Re:Contempt Culture (2015)
by nine_k on Wednesday September 15, 2021 @09:31PM
(#28546852)
Well, yes, in 2001, PHP was a badly designed, objectively bad language. Cannot deny.
The problem is not with the language, or whatever other suboptimal circumstances people may have. The problem is in the desire to mock, to put oneself on a whatever kind of higher ground, in lack of humility and compassion.
If somebody had to use PHP in 2001 (like e.g. the Wikipedia project), one should rather find out what forced them to use that language. Existing libraries, hosting options (a big thing about shared hosting offers prevalent in 2001), some other constraints. Considering other people no less intelligent than yourself, and respecting their choices as likely rational instead of deriding them as "obviously stupid", takes some growing up.
This problem happens more often to teenagers than to people with some more life experience. The computing world got filled with students and high-schoolers in 1990s as reasonably powerful PCs and the Internet became accessible. A lot of things were in their infancy then. It was unfortunately hard to expect maturity and humility from an average community member in nearly any newly-appeared community.
History can't be redone, but at least we can avoid repeating it in the future.
The problem is not with the language, or whatever other suboptimal circumstances people may have. The problem is in the desire to mock, to put oneself on a whatever kind of higher ground, in lack of humility and compassion.
If somebody had to use PHP in 2001 (like e.g. the Wikipedia project), one should rather find out what forced them to use that language. Existing libraries, hosting options (a big thing about shared hosting offers prevalent in 2001), some other constraints. Considering other people no less intelligent than yourself, and respecting their choices as likely rational instead of deriding them as "obviously stupid", takes some growing up.
This problem happens more often to teenagers than to people with some more life experience. The computing world got filled with students and high-schoolers in 1990s as reasonably powerful PCs and the Internet became accessible. A lot of things were in their infancy then. It was unfortunately hard to expect maturity and humility from an average community member in nearly any newly-appeared community.
History can't be redone, but at least we can avoid repeating it in the future.