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Comment by chamomeal | Hacker News Reader

People absolutely have VERY strong opinions and voice them constantly. True of every language but especially php. Almost feel like it’s more acceptable to rant about php than to praise it

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I attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf at a FOSS conference in 2006. It has been a long time, so I remember only a few things from the talk, but one thing I remember him talking about is how people love to complain about PHP, often on forums that are themselves written in PHP.

Did someone reply to him with this meme? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

No, in 2006 it was still considered poor form to reply with a low-effort meme phrase instead of meaningfully criticizing his position with your own.

Depends entirely on the forum.

I remember it being somewhat common for people to make forum posts consisting entirely of a joke image. However, they weren’t called memes at the time as the word had yet to be popularized.

It was not correct to interrupt a talk with a meme and it never has been.

But it's always been correct to interrupt a discussion on a PHP forum about PHP security by breaking into Rasmus's account and posting an ironic meme under his name.

    #include <stdstroustrupquote>

Rasmus also admits that he didn't really know what he was doing when he created PHP, and that it's a bit surprising that PHP has stayed as compatible as it has. I kind of respect him more for that than I once used to.

I know I used to have the impression of PHP as a messy language because I last worked with PHP4. It's come a long way since then, though I don't use it.

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