The truth about Rasmus the Lamer

Avatar von Johannes Schlüter

Rasmus made us think he was doing great work by developing PHP. But as you already could read in this mail a PhD(!) found out the truth about Rasmus: His stuff „is total crap“ and he isn’t „fit to write a single line of code“. That mail even includes some good advices for Rasmus, for example to „at least take the time to research [the] basics“.
Now this point of view started to become widespread: even the organizers of the Free and Open Source Software Week in Sri Lanka found out the truth about PHP’s father: His actual name is not Lerdorf but Lamersdorf. And understanding German you know that „Dorf“ means village, so in reality Rasmus is some lame village guy not made for the big open source world!
Sorry guys, move along, this PHP is just a buzzword…
(thank’s Andrei and Johann for these links)

Avatar von Johannes Schlüter

Kommentare

11 Antworten zu „The truth about Rasmus the Lamer“

  1. *chuckle*

    „Kindergarted“, somebody hand that guy a dictionary.

    – Davey

  2. Avatar von

    in comparison to true dynamic languages Perl, Python, Ruby, Obj-C, Lisp etc. PHP *is* total crap.

  3. Avatar von

    to anpnymous #2: if you’d be able to master Perl, Python, Ruby, Obj-C, Lisp and. PHP, there yould be no tiime to post comments on topics like that.

    Another point is that un-crappy langugages dont make a good coder.

  4. Avatar von Anonymous

    Damn! What a low level posting!

  5. I’ve used PHP extensively for many years and manage open-source PHP projects. I like it because it’s quick, but it sure is dirty too. As a programming language I tend to think that PHP is indeed pretty crappy — and I don’t think anyone that really uses PHP would really argue with that. Language coherence? consistency? security? But it sure has a lot of market share … and as we know in this M$-saturated world, that sure does count for a lot more than the quality of a product.

  6. Avatar von Pedro Cardoso
    Pedro Cardoso

    How can 1 (one) single Phd can influence such a big comunity?

    Why does that, after all these years, the „truth“ is found?

    I don’t know the person that wrote the original mail, but he must be a GOD to find out something that no one found out in these years…

    I never looked at the sources, and will not argue with the point of view of Hans, but in some way, I trust the market to flush away the products with the „quality“ described in that mail, and php as been around for a while.

    How should we judge a language? Must we research over the sources to find out if that specific language is good to use? Should we believe this kind of posting and move on to the next unrevealed language?

    Is there out there someone that digged out php with the same opinion?

    1. Yeah, I guess I would say that my low opinion of PHP as a *language* (and not as a solution) isn’t really based on the digging through the PHP sourcecode, but rather just using PHP. Besides the classic examples of inconsistency in the API (e.g. parameter orders), there are also some aspects of PHP that just don’t feel very well thought-out — e.g. the existence of interface enforcement without the ability to overload methods (as in what ‚overload‘ means in Java, C#, etc.). PHP is inherently procedural with some OO stuff stitched on … and the seams show. Presumably PHP is adapting to a changing userbase — e.g. one that wants PHP to be an OO language — but it’s struggling to adapt while maintaining backwards compatibility. This seems to be just creating a bigger & bigger mess.

      And I’d say that the market is not driven by quality of a language, but rather by ease-of-use (which PHP is) and things like features (which PHP has) and momentum (which PHP also has). For example, look at phpBB, a complete piece of crap from a code perspective (security vulnerabilities all the time), yet hugely popular because (presumably) it’s easy to get up and running and has a nice feature set.

      But, as I said, I use PHP and I even like PHP :) — but more as a solution than a language.

  7. I hope this is a practical joke otherwise this guy is a total jag-off piece of shit.

    Rasmus didn’t force anything on anyone, people loved his direction and built PHP to what it is today. This whole post is a waste of time.

  8. Who the hell cares what som „holier-than-though“ arcitecture/code „expert“ thinks, when the language is undoubdedly the fastes and easiest to use of all sollutions for small to medium web applications? The numbers speak for themselves. If you don’t want to use it, use JSP or ASP.NET f.ex. I don’t care what you use for your webpages/webapps – why should you care what I use? There’s allways some idiots who insist on confirming many people’s prejudice against „nerds“ and „geeks“.

    *Sheesh*

  9. huh?

    I don’t get it.

  10. guys, check for tags inside this article :)

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