> Except now it's 2012, and fellow programmers are still writing long screeds bemoaning the awfulness of PHP!
Yes, and not only did Jeff write one in 2008, but he wrote another one just now. You can't write 10 paragraphs about what a blight PHP is and then pretend like you're being constructive by admonishing us to create better tools.
In fact what everyone is doing with these rants is bike-shedding about an easy-to-hate language. It makes an easy topic that drives a lot of traffic because everyone has an opinion. It's just tabloid garbage for the hacker set.
A more objective view of things is that PHP is a capable-if-ugly language, and it co-exists just fine with thousands of other programming languages and frameworks all with their own visions, communities, and production applications. The existence of PHP is not harming other "better" languages at all. And if you really want to make an argument about languages hurting the state of programming, how about asserting that the dominance of imperative languages is irreparably damaging the ability of most programmers to work in functional languages where solutions are fundamentally more robust. Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company.
I won't belittle Jeff's contributions to the software world, because Stack Overflow is an amazing service, but despite the fact that I hate PHP, Rasmus' contribution to the software world is certainly much more important than Jeff's feel-good blog fluff.
"Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company."
PHP is used for web development. Microsoft's best alternative for web development is ASP.NET MVC which is open source.
> Except now it's 2012, and fellow programmers are still writing long screeds bemoaning the awfulness of PHP!
Yes, and not only did Jeff write one in 2008, but he wrote another one just now. You can't write 10 paragraphs about what a blight PHP is and then pretend like you're being constructive by admonishing us to create better tools.
In fact what everyone is doing with these rants is bike-shedding about an easy-to-hate language. It makes an easy topic that drives a lot of traffic because everyone has an opinion. It's just tabloid garbage for the hacker set.
A more objective view of things is that PHP is a capable-if-ugly language, and it co-exists just fine with thousands of other programming languages and frameworks all with their own visions, communities, and production applications. The existence of PHP is not harming other "better" languages at all. And if you really want to make an argument about languages hurting the state of programming, how about asserting that the dominance of imperative languages is irreparably damaging the ability of most programmers to work in functional languages where solutions are fundamentally more robust. Or what about the damage that proprietary platforms like .NET (which Jeff uses if I'm not mistaken) or iOS do to the programming world by restricting progress to a single company.
I won't belittle Jeff's contributions to the software world, because Stack Overflow is an amazing service, but despite the fact that I hate PHP, Rasmus' contribution to the software world is certainly much more important than Jeff's feel-good blog fluff.