NYCPHP Meetup

[David Krings]

Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
> There certainly is logic to PHP, but it's insane troll logic. It is not 
> a clean and elegant human logic like any normal person would expect and 
> understand without years of reeducation. Of course to those of us who 
> have had our brains rewired, this may seem normal, but it's not. We are 
> the ones marching out of step with the band.

Ah, come on, I must be some sick dude then. Here is the list of programming 
languages that I dealth with in the past 20 years:
1 Commodore BASIC V2 (hobby)
2 Simon's BASIC (hobby)
3 Commodre 64 assembler (hobby)
4 Logo (on the C 64 and the Apple IIe) (high school)
5 QBASIC (x86) (hobby)
6 ANSI C (university)
7 Delphi (hobby)
8 VB 6 (work)
9 VB .NET (hobby)
10 Paradox ObjectPAL (work)
11 C++ (hobby)
12 C Sharp (hobby)
13 Java (university, hobby)
14 8088 / Z80 Assembler (work, hobby)
That is when I stopped and decided that I hate programming and programming 
hates me. And then I came across PHP and got hooked for the following reasons
a) the other languages are way too primitive or too outdated to do something 
useful with these days (1-5, 10)
b) the other languages are way too cumbersome and complicated for me to 
understand them (6, 11-14)
c) the other languages aren't in a) or b), but don't lend themselves well for 
web development (8,9)
Leaves Delphi out, which honestly didn't stick in my mind as neither good or 
bad. Oh, and I did some TurboPascal some long time ago, but I only recall that 
I did, but not when and why. I also tried Curl when it came out first (the 
language, not the PHP cURL module), but couldn't get that one either and 
ditched it quickly.

And what is particularly interesting is that I don't get the logic of C or 
Java. In my opinion, there is no single human factor to these languages, 
neither in their logic nor in their commands. In PHP, if you want to do 
something think of an English word that best describes the action and look it 
up in the function list. I often did well with this approach as it isbased on 
human logic. Same applies to the way I develop my scripts. I first write the 
commentary, then translate the spoken language into PHP code, which isn't at 
all a far stretch. I never managed to pull that off in Java as hard as I 
tried. I read books, took classes, looked at code, dug through tutorials - no 
matter what I can't make any sense on why Java demands things to be done in a 
particular way. OK, maybe it doesn't go against all human logic, but it goes 
against my logic which I think is of average quality.

I think it isn't accurate to state that PHP defies any logic, human or not. 
Look at bright minds like Gallileo, he was outcast for not marching with the 
band. And in the end he was damn right. The only beef that I have with PHP is 
that whenever it comes to something that has to do with time or date the 
functions coded by apparently american developers screw the rest of the world 
over.

David