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Comment by bcheung | Hacker News Reader

You mean they are not using strlen as the hash function anymore? http://news.php.net/php.internals/70691

Wow, I constantly think that nothing about the horribleness of PHP can surprise me, and then Rasmus says something even more insane than his already insane statements. I mean choosing function names based on length because you didn't bother to write an actual hash function? AMAZING.

Anyway I'm just going to leave this here because it's great fun: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rasmus_Lerdorf

Some favorites:

"There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming."

"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I’ll just restart Apache every 10 requests."

Ladies and gentlemen, the author of pretty much the most popular web programming language out there!

>I mean choosing function names based on length because you didn't bother to write an actual hash function? AMAZING.

Context: "This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember the few function names."

at least he has the good sense to be arrogant about his lack of basic skill.

I think he has a bit of a right to be arrogant and self-deprecating, given that he managed to half-assedly bootstrap something more successful than most other, better programmers will ever achieve.

To be fair, his "get things done" attitude is a big part of why PHP is so popular. It avoids all pedantry and nerdiness (even when it absolutely shouldn't), erring entirely on the side of "let's just get something working."

That might not be the right attitude for all programming languages, but it is working for PHP in at least some sense.

I will admit that's a fair point. The one virtue PHP has is that it's pretty direct in what it does.

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