Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

by afterz • 17 years ago

58 108 17 years ago

en.wikiquote.org

nostrademons5• 17 years ago

Most of them aren't that surprising if you've used PHP. ;-)

jdp• 17 years ago

At least he's not trying to kid anyone.

jdale27• 17 years ago

Not surprising at all.

zaphar• 17 years ago

Those 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• 17 years ago

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

jrockway11• 17 years ago

Read PHP's parser.

sorbits• 17 years ago

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

thejo• 17 years ago

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 :)

randallsquared3• 17 years ago

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.

akamaka• 17 years ago

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

Asa-Nisse• 17 years ago

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.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

you should unit test your php

tentonova25• 17 years ago

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.

breck• 17 years ago

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 ideas, many of which have created tremendous value that I think far outweigh the costs.

cellis2• 17 years ago

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.

mcantelon2• 17 years ago

>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?

jawngee8• 17 years ago

Yet Wordpress is still the most widely used blog software ever. PHPBB and it's ilk still run the forum game. Wikipedia has yet be unseated.

If it's cost > it's profit, why is it still used so widely?

I recently replaced a C#/.NET app with a PHP version and saved a company close to a million a year in licensing, servers, staffing and development costs. Not to mention it took my team a third of the time to develop as the original application, yet performed better and had more functionality. There was a significant gap in LoC as well.

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

nir• 17 years ago

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 and hearing him speak a few times, which makes the snarky comments here seem even more juvenile.

Jach3• 17 years ago

I 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. ;)

jrockway11• 17 years ago

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 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.)

netcan2• 17 years ago

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.

mcantelon2• 17 years ago

>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.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

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.

jawngee8• 17 years ago

How do you get anything done? You seem so hung up on the tools versus creating stuff with tools. I guess it makes sense because you're the maintainer of a web framework ... for perl ... a language saddled with a checkered history of generating some pretty unmaintainable shit. And my guess is that you will respond saying "you can write maintainable code in perl!" And, of course, one would counter that you can do the same with PHP. Which boils this whole discussion down to being about the developers and the quality of developers, and less about the quality of the languages.

So why are there so many crappy PHP developers? Because anyone can make it do something approximating what they are envisioning it doing, no matter the skill level. That seems pretty powerful to me. And, in the end, it's really about the results instead of how one necessarily got to those results. You can't make money if you don't deliver a product. And if history is any indication, only a tiny fraction of the masses care about quality. The dominance of Wal-mart and MySpace are proof of this. My guess about your guess is those millions of lost man-hours have been made up with the millions of hours beating competing products to market due to the rapid nature of PHP development. I mean if we are throwing around unverifiable assumptions, let's do it, let's get crazy with it.

"A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop." - Robert Hughes

siegler• 17 years ago

every one of PHP's advantages is offered by other languages

Speed in a shared hosting environment. I've read about developers running multiple commercial sites from a single Dreamhost account e.g. http://www.pseudocoder.com/archives/2009/01/04/how-much-mone... . That's not realistic with Java, RoR, or Perl.

mixmax• 17 years ago

I don't think you understand PHP's greatest strength. It's all about the right tool for the right job for the right man.

PHP was invented so that designers could add a <p>Hello <b>Martin</b></p> and think it was cool that their homepage showed different names based on who you were. For most people basic functionality and the ability to connect to a database is more than enough. You can probably write up more than 90% of all webpages without using closuers, lambdas, recursive functions, object oriented programming and what have you. And the people who write these webpages don't care about programming at all, they just want the job done. These quotes from Rasmus shows where he's coming from.

You can of course argue that people shouldn't launch webpages if they don't know what they're doing, the terrible safety concerns of letting idiots code stuff for the web, etc. but it would be like scoffing at people who don't drive an extra souped up Ferrari Enzo - very arrogant. Some pople just want to get from A to B. These are the people who use PHP. And incidentally they are also the people down in the trenches actually building all the little sites that make the world go round.

philjackson• 17 years ago

I wonder how many IE6 users actually choose their browser?

rams• 17 years ago

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.

docgnome• 17 years ago

I've heard Joel Spolsky say that. https://stackoverflow.fogbugz.com/default.asp?W29083

omouse• 17 years ago

Let PHP be a lesson in what happens when you don't think before you code.

10ren2• 17 years ago

recent reddit submission & discussion on Rasmus: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/anmgx/i_hope_no...

and the HN thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043400

10ren2• 17 years ago

If 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• 17 years ago

To 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• 17 years ago

I 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• 17 years ago

When 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.

Some surprising quotes from Rasmus Lerdorf (php creator)

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