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Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)
- nostrademons 17y agoMost of them aren't that surprising if you've used PHP. ;-)
- jdp 17y agoAt least he's not trying to kid anyone.
- jdale27 17y agoNot surprising at all.
- zaphar 17y agoThose quotes aren't surprising. Someone with the attitude shown in those quotes would create a language exactly like PHP. And that language would be hated by most of the people who actually enjoy coding.
- kgrin 17y agoTo be fair, some ("I still am really bad at writing parsers.") seem to be more signs of humility than confessions of incompetence.
- thejo 17y agoHe's always been pretty open about his "just get the job done" approach. That's exactly what PHP is too. Not beautiful, well designed etc., but gets the job done in most cases. This is a mail he showed at a talk - http://lerdorf.com/fanmail.txt http://lerdorf.com/fanmail.txt I'm sure he enjoys it when people get worked up about PHP :)
- randallsquared 17y agoThat email is confusing. "From: damien taylor" in 2003 yet signed "Walter Bagdasarian", which unusual-seeming name belongs to a guy who was convicted in 2009 of threatening Obama. Odd.
- akamaka 17y agoIt fits, he got arrested for posting an idiot comment about Obama on the Yahoo message boards.
- jacquesm 17y agoUsed to be you had to do something before you got charged. Threatening seems so much like thoughtcrime.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ubernostrum 17y agoMaking threats has been a "something" that's considered a crime for... well, a long time. Typically the law requires that the threat be at least somewhat believable in order to be successfully prosecuted, but there are certain types of threats which are criminal regardless of ability to be carried out (e.g., threatening to plant a bomb in a public square is a crime, even if you have no way of building or planting the bomb).
- 17y ago
- Asa-Nisse 17y agoThis makes me love PHP more. If that was possible. He just gets it. If you want to spend your days drawing UML, writing documentation and unit tests. That is dandy, but you're in PHPLand now. This is our land, and we dont care about no freakin' memory leaks.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoyou should unit test your php
- tentonova2 17y agoDo you have any concept of just how much time and money hacked-together PHP has cost? Do you know how many aggregate human lifetimes are wasted on the simple act of regularly upgrading PHPBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, et al? It's mindboggling. It's sad. It's penny wise, pound foolish.
- breck 17y agoI think you make a valid point. Maintaining PHP apps can be a pain and the language isn't the prettiest to work with. However, PHP has created a world where millions of people can create basic web applications, which has led to the creation of tens of millions of new sites and applications, some of those which have changed the world. PHP has allowed more people to code, which has allowed the world to test many more ideas, many of which have created tremendous value that I think far outweigh the costs.
- tentonova2 17y agoThis sounds like a false dichotomy: - A world that has PHP and enabled web developers. - A world without PHP in which only Java EE-enabled engineers can write webapps. I think that's a demonstrably false assessment. A language as poorly designed and implemented as PHP isn't necessary to be accessible to "millions of people" -- in fact, does the opposite in enabling them to make serious and expensive mistakes.
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- nir 17y agoRasmus Lerdorf created the most popular language for building web apps. Websites that changed the world were built with this language, and most newcomers seem to choose it as well. It managed to get a substantial share of a market that companies like Microsoft or Sun put huge resources into. On top of all that, he actually remains a pretty cool and down to earth guy, as far as I can tell from reading his online stuff and hearing him speak a few times, which makes the snarky comments here seem even more juvenile.
- Jach 17y agoI like it when language designers are "cool". My favorite language is Python, but I like Larry Wall's quirky personality better than Guido's, and Rasmus' is great. ;)
- jrockway 17y agoBut it's not intrinsically good; every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages, without all the downsides. PHP's poor design and implementation has probably cost the world millions of lost man-hours; loss that could have been avoided by choosing a better-designed solution. It's certainly an accomplishment to create popular software, but this popular software is not necessarily something that should be used. The popularity is a function of choices made by uneducated users. (IE 6 is very popular, after all, but it's definitely not the best web browser around.)
- netcan 17y agoI think you could make the somewhat tautological case that IE 6 is not bad enough to make many people use something else or that php is good enough to make many people choose it. Defining good is always tricky, but being chosen by many people when other good choices are available is not a bad test for certain definitions of good. Choices may not always be %100 rational. They are usually not random.
- nostrademons 17y agoBut IE6 is bad enough to make people use something else, and PHP is not good enough to make many people choose it. Who purposely downloads and installs IE6 these days when you have Chrome/Firefox/IE8 available? And who writes a new webapp in PHP? Most people seem to miss the role that time plays in language choice. PHP's very far from the best choice for webapps now, but it was the best choice when it was invented in 1995, and even for a while afterwards (such as when FaceBook was created in 2004).
- rams 17y agoHe also reportedly said,"Humans can't write thread-safe code. It's simply beyond us". (Can't find the source). I have heard him say at a conference that, PHP is for week-end warriors.
- docgnome 17y agoI've heard Joel Spolsky say that. https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W29083 https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W29083
- omouse 17y agoLet PHP be a lesson in what happens when you don't think before you code.
- 10ren 17y agorecent reddit submission & discussion on Rasmus: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/anmgx/i_hope_no_one_ever_does_this_to_you_because_it/ http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/anmgx/i_hope_no... and the HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043400 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043400
- 10ren 17y agoIf we write for our peers, and you are a highly qualified academic, then your market is small. But if you just want to get the job done, you have many peers, and your market is enormous. And, at times, every one of us just wants to get the job done; and at times, each of us is so distracted or tired that our effective intelligence drops. For market success, the ideal place to be is just smart enough to be able to understand the ivory tower issues that the solution needs; but dumb enough to relate to the everyman and agree with him ("Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch"). Or perhaps it's idealistic vs. pragmatic - regardless, you need both.
- senko 17y agoTo add to the noise here: all people bashing here, please remember webdev landscape around the time PHP got started (or around the time it got to version 3, which looked somewhat a real language). I started using PHP as a switch over from Perl (which had some powerul but cumbersome templating engines, and boiled down to much more boilerplate than PHP for the same task) or C-based CGI (that was not fun). So, I see PHP as an enabler to webdev to the masses. It was really hard to do "dynamic web pages", as these were called back in the days, in anything else, and it was a breeze in PHP. I believe this is why many people started doing it, which in turn resulted in developing better frameworks for better languages (like Rails, Django, etc.). Comparison with IE6 has been drawn. IE6 was the best browser in its day. The trouble is, it stayed dominant for far too long. The same could be said for PHP. If it was massively replaced by other alternatives by, say, the time PHP5 came out (which IMHO looks as the first PHP version that considered itself as a serious language; php<3 were gross hacks, php3 was nice, php4 was service pack to php3), then many woes now attributed to it would never have existed. I personally use Django nowadays for any new projects I do, having done stuff in PHP before. I have a hate/hate relationship with PHP, I consider it a very bad language as languages go, but it's still invaluable for quick hacks, in which boilerplate for other system takes more to generate than writing the 10 or so lines of PHP.
- david927 17y agoI don't like PHP as a language and so it's not surprising that he admits to a shoddy, poor effort. But I, too, dislike programming; languages are kludgey. (Ok, LISP and its derivatives aren't, but that's not solving the problem as much as reducing the problem set to one that can be solved.) I like building things, and if to do that, I have to program, so be it. But I constantly feel like I'm building a house with Scotch tape.
- ahoyhere 17y agoWhen you're in the audience and he's keynoting, it doesn't feel like "Hee hee, lazy programmers are good programmers." It feels like "This is stupid and by extension, so are you, and why am I even talking to you about this?" I don't think he's a happy person, either.