He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet.

Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has allowed countless developers to solve problems quickly without having to learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.

There's a huge difference between actual pragmatism and shooting yourself in the foot in the name of pragmatism.

No, you shouldn't build your program out of some overengineered metahyperpolymorphic Proton and Electron base classes in the name of "elegance". But the problem with PHP is that it goes completely to the other extreme: it has no internal consistency and little foresight. Simplicity is a great desideratum, but it shouldn't come at the expense of sense.

In the context of a startup hire, think about it this way:

He has created something very popular and widely used for an extremely difficult to please market with a huge amount of competition, some of it from scary places. The domain is a hard one.

I hear this stuff all of the time about how PHP fails to the point of destroying an application because of some oddities in the language. As if taking (easy) steps to correct these in the application itself is impossible. I don't think that is true.

What pisses me off the most about it is that every person that ever mentions this forgets Facebook, one of the biggest players on the Internet, is built on PHP. (Along with Digg, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Photobucket, SourceForge, Flickr, Yahoo, Friendster, Wordpress/derivatives, Magento........). Not that that is the only language they use, but this is a ridiculous claim to say the least.

Yeah, PHP has faults. So do most languages - but sometimes those faults are also strengths.

I feel the same, but couldn't manage to articulate it. Nicely done. I agree... humility is very important.

Actually, Rasmus is one of the smartest people I know.

I've met Rasmus once, when he generously spoke at our humble community college during his tenure at Yahoo. He came across as pragmatic and opinionated. In his writings and presentations he always stresses simplicity and efficiency (two virtues often lost in the quest for novelty and elegance), and he conspicuously disdains excess. Check out his 2008 DrupalCon presentation and you will see that he is a straight shooter who does not curry favor or spare the ignorant.

How do you square that with him having designed a byzantine language, written an inefficient implementation, and built a standard library that's the most excessive of all time?

The things he disdains as novel in other languages are 40 years old — as old as he is!

And how do you square your view with the fact that PHP is one of the most pervasive languages out there? If it is so terribly inefficient and byzantine, then nobody in their right mind should be using it. Yet they do. So they are either all crazy, or perhaps the things you don't like about it aren't actually very important to most people. They probably like the fact that you can get things done extremely quickly in it.

One of my favorite quote from Rasmus:

I have said so many times, PHP is not about purity in CS principles or architecture, it is about solving the ugly web problem with an admittedly ugly, but extremely functional and convenient solution. If you are looking for purity you are in the wrong boat. Get out now before you get hit by a wet cat!

http://news.php.net/article.php?group=php.internals&arti...

While that quote should understandably give anyone pause, I don't think it's nearly as damning as you seem to think, nor single-handedly enough to advocate against hiring him. As you say, he's probably quite intelligent, and his solve-problems-damn-the-consequences approach can actually be a crucial piece of a development team. Some developers will like nothing better than to take one of his quick and dirty "it just works" PHP algorithms and fine-tune it until it is more reliable than the server software hosting it.

Plus, of course, when you desperately need something done or fixed YESTERDAY, memory leaks are indeed the last thing on your mind. In the world of rapid developments and instant news spread that is online commerce, fixing a crucial 0-day issue at the cost of 3-5 minutes of downtime per hour until a better fix is implemented? No-brainer.

I'm pretty sure he was using that to illustrate an extreme. He talks a lot about performance and he will spend hours lowering latency by 5% and restarting Apache every 10 requests would certainly not help performance. I think his point was that sometimes you need to simply solve the problem and move on.

That's not the worst hire, that's the normal hire! A lot of programmers are out there that are like that.

I used to work with a developer, about 2-3 years ago. He was originally CTO of a startup bought by Yahoo! back in the day (Hotjobs). He'd develop live on the server, no version control, yap at you over IM or across the room to get out of the file that he was editing, restart Apache every few seconds to get mod_python to reload. It was absolute chaos. He's a great hacker and a brilliant guy, but some people are truly shooting themselves in the foot for the sake of being "old school". It all comes down to a stubborn laziness. There's definitely a balance between sticking to what you know and prematurely ejaculating over the latest and greatest technologies. Some people just refuse to use new things.

Google "Rasmus Lerdorf". Look at some of his presentations & posts (which btw are impressively ego-free, compared to the usual output of web mini-celebs which achieved a lot less). He's far from being stupid or lazy, but like any good developer knows that thinking of yourself as stupid and acting lazy are virtues that force you to build simple stuff that works.