News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by tomcam on Sunday September 03, 2017 @07:54AM (#15160977)
Rasmus should win a Turing award for bringing an easy to use web-centric server language to regular people. He does not get nearly the attention he deserves.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by jimktrains2 on Sunday September 03, 2017 @08:36AM (#15161121)
Why? Php wasn't some new, amazing idea. There was perl at the time as well. Php took off mostly because of mod_php, but there was already cgi. There was also asp from Microsoft that had almost all the same properties as php e.g. inline code and markup, upload and refresh), but Windows only. Php was just a little simpler to configure on a Linux webserver than cgi, but at the expenses of using php -- we've been paying for the decision for what, 20years now.

As someone who works in php daiy, I despise the language. It's getting much better than php4, but it still is lacking.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by goshx on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:09AM (#15161481)
Why do you still work with it?
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by jimktrains2 on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:12AM (#15161500)
There are more things to a job than just the language used. Company culture, work environment, work-life balance, and coworkers to name a couple.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by goshx on Sunday September 03, 2017 @11:09AM (#15161801)
fair enough :)
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @08:58AM (#15161205)
Anything but a Turing award. Turing was a computer scientist who cared.

"We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all." -Rasmus Lerdorf

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by dvfjsdhgfv on Sunday September 03, 2017 @09:55AM (#15161416)
I also don't think PHP deserves a Turing award, but the remark about abstract methods and protected properties is completely irrelevant - you can have an amazing language without these and crappy ones with them.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:20AM (#15161537)
The point of the quote is not about abstract methods and properties, it's about not giving a shit, and being proud of it.

If you really didn't already know about Rasmus Lerdorf's anti-intellectual attitude (who admits to being "really, really bad" and a "terrible coder", but still thinks he's "better than you"), then here are some more quotes:

There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.

I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.

I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems.

For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)

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

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by verletx64 on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:37AM (#15161622)
I think what's getting me is a really superficial notion of what 'solving problems' means.

It's a leaking ceiling, a bucket under the leak ostensibly 'fixes' your original problem of water spilling out onto the floor, but now you've got the problem that at some point, the bucket will fill up.

It's rare for most problems you face in the workplace for the difficult part to be actually solving the problem. It's solving it in a way that doesn't just create three other messes elsewhere, in a way that somebody else can come along and understand how the problem was solved and in a way that doesn't hamstring you in the future.

Some of these quotes are really baffling. I mean, he must be being facetious or something.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by err4nt on Sunday September 03, 2017 @02:35PM (#15163023)
I think it's called self-deprecating humour. I don't know too much about this guy, but these quotes endear him to somebody like me who is learning as much JavaScript as I need to do the things I want to do, but didn't necessarily come from a CS background. He seems like he's questioning what is pragmatic by using a bit of hyperbole.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:52AM (#15161704)
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems. -JWZ

Jamie is facetious. Rasmus is just incompetent.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by haburka on Sunday September 03, 2017 @11:38AM (#15161970)
I think those quotes are not to be interpreted literally. It's very likely that there's some humor in them that's being lost in this context. What does he even mean by bad or good? Does he really hate programming or maybe he hates academic programming?

Additionally, the project has really moved on. Admittedly, there are people who still code in php 5.5 and don't use a framework, or roll their own, but their experience does not reflect on how pleasant php can be. Coding in php without using the ecosystem is like walking across town instead of driving.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @05:22PM (#15163997)
You sound like you're trying to justify a Trump tweet. But there's a long well documented history and consistent pattern you're ignoring.

Do you consider PHP 5.3.7 "moving on"?

> 5.3.7 upgrade warning: [22-Aug-2011] Due to unfortunate issues with 5.3.7 (see bug#55439) users should postpone upgrading until 5.3.8 is released (expected in a few days).

No seriously, he's literally as careless as he claims to be, and his lack of giving a shit about things that are extremely important has caused actual serious security problems, like breaking crypt() by checking in sloppy buggy code that would have caused a unit test to fail, but without bothering to run the unit tests (because so many of them failed anyway, so who cares??), and then MAKING A RELEASE of PHP 5.3.7 with, OF ALL THINGS, a broken untested crypt()!

http://i.imgur.com/cAvSr.jpg

Do you think that's just his sense of humor, a self deprecating joke, breaking then releasing crypt() without testing, that's funny in some context? What context would that be? Do you just laugh and shrug it off with "Let Rasmus be Rasmus!"

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jsudd/you_see_...

>r314434 (rasmus): Make static analyzers happy

>r315218 (stas): Unbreak crypt() (fix bug #55439) # If you want to remove static analyser messages, be my guest, but please run unit tests after

http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/trunk/ext/standard/php...

https://plus.google.com/113641248237520845183/posts/g68d9RvR...

>Rasmus Lerdorf

>+Lorenz H.-S. We do. See http://gcov.php.net

>You can see the code coverage, test case failures, Valgrind reports and more for each branch.

>The crypt change did trigger a test to fail, we just went a bit too fast with the release and didn't notice the failure. This is mostly because we have too many test failures which is primarily caused by us adding tests for bug reports before actually fixing the bug. I still like the practice of adding test cases for bugs and then working towards making the tests pass, however for some of these non-critical bugs that are taking a while to change we should probably switch them to XFAIL (expected fail) so they don't clutter up the test failure output and thus making it harder to spot new failures like this crypt one.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by tomcam on Sunday September 03, 2017 @08:37PM (#15164810)
Or maybe he has a sense of humor, a trait in greviously short supply here on HN
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by firasd on Sunday September 03, 2017 @09:07AM (#15161232)
Turing didn't care about Java-style OOP though :)
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:47AM (#15161677)
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by bpicolo on Sunday September 03, 2017 @09:39AM (#15161358)
> We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods

And php has both protected properties and abstract methods now

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by tannhaeuser on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:24AM (#15161551)
I don't agree. PHP was a quick shot to grab market share from Perl and other web development languages used at the time. While Rasmus may have developed it in good faith to bring easy web site programming to the masses, PHP is the single piece of software standing out for countless DDoS attacks making life difficult for web site owners of PHP and non-PHP web sites alike, and driving folks to centralized services such as CloudFlare.

PHP's original use case is dynamic HTML generation from HTML/SGML processing instructions embedded in otherwise static HTML. That's useful, but PHP's lack of HTML-aware template expansion and escaping mechanisms was and is bordering on the criminal IMHO.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:45AM (#15161658)
Well there's certainly is a well documented case for negligence:

"I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers." -Rasmus Lerdorf

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by vesak on Sunday September 03, 2017 @09:20AM (#15161278)
Or perhaps he should be in prison for being partially responsible for some of the worst security breaches in the industry.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:43AM (#15161642)
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by vesak on Sunday September 03, 2017 @02:32PM (#15163012)
Indeed. I realize the guy I answered to was probably just trolling, but it was very effective. To suggest that Rasmus should get academic praise for PHP is highly insulting.
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by grzm on Sunday September 03, 2017 @02:36PM (#15163028)
There's significant daylight between

- someone should receive an award

- someone has had a large impact

- someone should go to prison

Countering the first with the third isn't very constructive, particularly as you note "I realize the guy I answered to was probably just trolling." It just further degrades the conversation.

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @06:14PM (#15164248)
Mark Karpelès's crappy PHP code full of gaping security holes lost many people a hell of a lot of money ($450 million), and earned him a year in prison.

http://themerkle.com/mark-karpeles-twitter/

Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by jsjohnst on Monday September 04, 2017 @12:07PM (#15169096)
That's a leap.. The year in prison was related to embezzling charges, not the collapse of Mt. Gox due to his "crappy PHP code full of gaping security holes".
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by colejohnson66 on Sunday September 03, 2017 @10:17AM (#15161524)
Should we put the Federal Reserve in prison for printing money used in crime?
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by vesak on Sunday September 03, 2017 @02:28PM (#15162993)
No, but should we give it the Nobel Prize for it?
Re:Q&A: PHP Creator Rasmus Lerdorf (2002) by DonHopkins on Sunday September 03, 2017 @06:02PM (#15164194)
Right, it's insulting to the memory of Turing to suggest giving a prize named after him to Rasmus Lerdorf.

How about the Thomas Midgley award, for having "had more impact on the internet than any other single organism in Earth's history"?

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley

Thomas Midgley (born 18 May 1889; died 2 November 1944), was an American inventor. His two most famous inventions are both now banned because they are dangerous for the world environment: the use of lead in petrol (gasoline) and the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigerators. Midgley was accidentally killed by something he was inventing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.#Legacy

Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of some of his innovations. His work led to the release of large quantities of lead into the atmosphere as a result of the large-scale combustion of leaded gasoline all over the world. High atmospheric lead levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems from childhood, including neurological impairment, and with increased levels of violence and criminality in cities.

Thomas Midgley Jr. died three decades before the ozone-depleting and greenhouse gas effects of CFCs in the atmosphere became widely known. Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." J. R. McNeill, an environmental historian, opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."