To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin's-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world's least-loved but arguably most-used programming language. It's loathed, it's despised, and it's everywhere. WordPress, meaning TechCrunch, is brought to you by PHP. Yahoo? PHP. Facebook? Them too--although Quora founder and former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo hastens to stress that "PHP was out of the question" for Quora, and Facebook merely uses it because it's "stuck on that for legacy reasons". And yet PHP is allegedly used by more than three-quarters of all web sites. To sum up: everybody hates PHP, except for the countless legions who use it, who should all be very ashamed of themselves. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call that a general consensus. PHP has been called--and by people widely respected in the industry, too--"a fractal of bad design," "the biggest, stinkiest dump that the computer industry had taken on my life in a decade," and, worst of all, "the Nickelback of programming languages."
Sunday, July 29, 2012
In Praise Of Quick And Filthy
To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin's-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world's least-loved but arguably most-used programming language. It's loathed, it's despised, and it's everywhere. WordPress, meaning TechCrunch, is brought to you by PHP. Yahoo? PHP. Facebook? Them too--although Quora founder and former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo hastens to stress that "PHP was out of the question" for Quora, and Facebook merely uses it because it's "stuck on that for legacy reasons". And yet PHP is allegedly used by more than three-quarters of all web sites. To sum up: everybody hates PHP, except for the countless legions who use it, who should all be very ashamed of themselves. I don't think it's an exaggeration to call that a general consensus. PHP has been called--and by people widely respected in the industry, too--"a fractal of bad design," "the biggest, stinkiest dump that the computer industry had taken on my life in a decade," and, worst of all, "the Nickelback of programming languages."
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