Re:25 Years of PHP
by DonHopkins on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @05:12PM
(#23482175)
>but it was certainly widely understood by people who cared.
Rasmus Lerdorf and the early-to-mid PHP community simply didn't care. As you can see by the quotes I posted in another comment, Rasmus Lerdorf actually brags about how much he doesn't care. It's a textbook example of anti-intellectualism.
What the early-to-mid PHP community cared about, and was extremely successful at, was evangelism, and recruiting as many new inexperienced developers as possible.
That didn't mix well with all the foot-guns and design flaws they carelessly built into the language, and left in for far too many long years.
Along the axis of care, PHP is the opposite of Java. Compare PHP's complete lack of design with how carefully and conscientiously Java was designed (I may not agree with all of Java's design decisions, but at least they're all carefully researched, thought out, and debated to death first):
>"In the Java universe, pretty much everybody is really disciplined. It's kind of like mountain climbing. You don't dare get sloppy with your gear when you're mountain climbing, because it has a clear price." -James Gosling
Rasmus Lerdorf and the early-to-mid PHP community simply didn't care. As you can see by the quotes I posted in another comment, Rasmus Lerdorf actually brags about how much he doesn't care. It's a textbook example of anti-intellectualism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism
What the early-to-mid PHP community cared about, and was extremely successful at, was evangelism, and recruiting as many new inexperienced developers as possible.
That didn't mix well with all the foot-guns and design flaws they carelessly built into the language, and left in for far too many long years.
Along the axis of care, PHP is the opposite of Java. Compare PHP's complete lack of design with how carefully and conscientiously Java was designed (I may not agree with all of Java's design decisions, but at least they're all carefully researched, thought out, and debated to death first):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22210073
>"In the Java universe, pretty much everybody is really disciplined. It's kind of like mountain climbing. You don't dare get sloppy with your gear when you're mountain climbing, because it has a clear price." -James Gosling