Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator) • Hacker News Board

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#21

Post by mcantelon » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:09 AM UTC

tentonova2 wrote: post #14

Asa-Nisse wrote: post #8

This 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.

Do 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.

>Do you have any concept of just how much time and money hacked-together PHP has cost?

I don't think it's fair to blame bad programming on the language itself.

>Do you know how many aggregate human lifetimes are wasted on the simple act of regularly upgrading PHPBB, WordPress, MediaWiki, et al?

Software written in other languages doesn't require upgrading?

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#22

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:28 AM UTC

netcan wrote: post #17

jrockway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 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 u…

I 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.

But 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).

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#23

Post by sorbits » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:28 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #13

kgrin wrote: post #6

To be fair, some ("I still am really bad at writing parsers.") seem to be more signs of humility than confessions of incompetence.

Read PHP's parser.

The parser in PHP 3 and up was written by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#24

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:30 AM UTC

cellis wrote: post #19

tentonova2 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do 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.

On the other hand, think of all the jobs and employment created as a byproduct of all this "waste"! I daresay php has created wealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_fallacy

Think of all the cool stuff they could have been inventing had they not needed to look up the name of strfind(?), and whether it takes the needle or the haystack first.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#25

Post by jrockway » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:31 AM UTC

mcantelon wrote: post #18

jrockway wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 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 u…

>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. Could you give some examples of this? I'm not a huge fan of PHP, but it generally works, as folks like FaceBook have proven.

Could you give some examples of this?

This has been described in detail thousands of times. Google it.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#26

Post by InclinedPlane » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:34 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #15

nir wrote: post #10

Rasmus 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…

But 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 u…

That may be true today but PHP is old in web terms, when PHP began to become popular it was at a time when it had little competition that offered the same ability to build dynamic web pages with relative ease. PHP spent enough time at the top of the web dev heap to build up a substantial network effect. The comparative advantages of other technologies, large though they may by, are not yet enough to push PHP from the top spot.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#27

Post by rams » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:35 AM UTC

He 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.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#28

Post by akamaka » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:40 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #9

thejo wrote: post #7

He'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 I'm sure he enjoys it when people get worked up about PHP :)

That 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.

It fits, he got arrested for posting an idiot comment about Obama on the Yahoo message boards.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#29

Post by potatolicious » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:44 AM UTC

tentonova2 wrote: post #20

breck wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 i…

This 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.

Yet the fact of the matter is that's how the cards fell - we had the well-designed, well-implemented languages and frameworks that failed utterly to find any foothold with amateurs and beginners, and only found refuge with the Java EE-enabled engineers.

And then we had PHP.

I'm inclined to side with the parent poster - yes, PHP has a lot of problems when you attempt to make it overly complex, but on the other hand it has introduced many people to programming who would otherwise never have even attempted (or even be able to), and driven ubiquitous web scripting forward single-handedly. Heck, even today, think about someone trying to run a blog - anyone reasonably experienced with a computer can buy hosting and install WordPress with almost no work... try that with anything written in Python?

PHP has a very low barrier to entry, and IMHO a lot of the hate directed at it is frankly jealousy. We are jealous, as professionals, that it is deadly simple to replicate some of our hard work, and that the people doing it are amateurs. This is the same reason people heap hate on VB.

I'm inclined to compare PHP to MySpace - yes, MySpace pages aren't pretty, in fact a lot are downright atrocious. You can make some specious claims about how MySpace-inspired "web design" has made the internet a worse place, somehow, but it would be a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, both PHP and MySpace opened up a world of possibility to a lot of users who didn't have it before; picking at it really is just being pretentious and elitist.

Re: Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

#30

Post by netcan » Mon, Jan 11, 2010, 6:48 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #22

netcan wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

But 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 i…

Many people write new webapps in php.

Nobody purposely downloads IE6. That isn't the point though. If they buy a computer (maybe this isn't true anymore) and go to Google using it they don't go "something's wrong." They just keep using it.