Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Even more amusing
New approach to installing a more modern Linux on the Cobalt RaQ4—getting another harddrive, doing the install on that, and putting that harddrive in the Cobalt RaQ4.
More on this as details become available.
I'd hate to think of what PHP would look like if Larry Wall got his hands on it …
Popular opinion about PHP is polarized. Language purists tend not to like the somewhat haphazard implementation of many features and some of the inconsistencies that have emerged over the years. At the same time, pragmatic problem solvers tend to love how PHP seems to almost read your mind and present itself as the perfect Web problem solving tool.
What it all boils down to is that PHP was never meant to win any beauty contests. It wasn't designed to introduce any new revolutionary programming paradigms. It was designed to solve a single problem: the Web problem. That problem can get quite ugly, and sometimes you need an ugly tool to solve your ugly problem. Although a pretty tool may, in fact, be able to solve the problem as well, chances are that an ugly PHP solution can be implemented much quicker and with many fewer resources. That generally sums up PHP's stubborn function-over-form approach throughout the years.
I still don't like PHP (it's the “language purist” in me) but at least this sheds some light on some of the oddities in the language (although it still doesn't explain what Rasmus Lerdorf was on when he created variable variables or superglobals—<shudder>)
