PHP always reminds me of the Dijkstra quote:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
And Dijkstra was kidding. As is Rasmus when he says he'll restart Apache every 10 requests. Hyperbole. Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click. It has to.
I especially liked this:
> Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click.
I started at 5 or 6 with Basic, then progressed to Object Pascal early on, then C, C++, PHP, Java and finally Javascript and C# - I believe this wide experience has served me well over my almost 30 years' of programming (Christmas I'm getting old!).
I think there is a time and a place for 'just get shit done, fast', as well as spending time building 'elegant' code. But, if anything, the compromise between these 2 is possibly the thing I struggle with most.
Scores of developers that were raised on BASIC assert that knowledge of BASIC gives you brain damage. Presumably, they do not consider themselves to be brain-damaged. Similar things happen with, say, products of public schooling.
Which isn't to advance an, "I was spanked and I turned out fine..." kind of argument. Even if that's true, we can establish higher floors than "fine." It's the self-defeating hysterics around the presentation that make it come off the wrong way to me.