Today, Wednesday, let me entertain you a while explaining you what, in my modest opinion, is PHP all about.
I look after PHP eleven years ago, via Eduard a friend of mine - who sadly leaved us becaus of a stroke ten years ago- and a brilliant photographer who introduced me in the world wide web programming lifestyle.
Those times, I remember, PHP was kind of a language for outsiders, pseudo-programming language for newbies that easily let one develop, say, Flash applications with CMSs and all that mattered. You had a Windows machine and we hacked it with Linux, Apache and...Personal Home Page, now called Processing Hypertext Language, acronym of PHP.
No one, no University in Spain, no serious trade company, used Linux then. WE loose money and time, but we beleived in Open-Source. Then.
My work was focused to work with KDE in Macintosh. Until the year 2000, when OS X appeared, my efforts were seen like a foolish spare of time, specially in the Department of Physics from the University of Barcelona, where I took some courses on SUSe Linux. That was in 1997.
For me, educated in the principles of logic I had learned while I was studying Philosophy, computational languages were something exciting. A bridge between languages and maths.
Multimedia, as we know it today was something completely new and opened. Logic has to be true as far we concern what we explain via a computer is true. Call it a photographer's book, an economic report or whatever.
So we spare a lot of time, days, months. And I was seduced by Javascript, more than PHP. We fight against browsers . In that early ages there were only IE dot five and netscape dot four as common browsers,still Mosaic was around.
Today, when I have a look at all that two dot zero stuff, I recover my old books of Javascript and , to me , there is nothing new under the sun. Same processes, new libraries, but still based on the same principles.
I saw clearly, those days, that Javascript was the perfect solution to write desktop applications via browser, without depending upon a database.
We had XML, a small piece of text that could be overwritten via cookies. I remeber asking in the University if there were some courses on Javascript. By that time, not so far from today, twelve thousand experts/teachers were absolutely dedicated to ASP and SQL Server. Or Pascal or Fortran. I stopped working with Basic and DB2 when I was sixteen and I leave college.
No Javascript at all. But we were still using PHP because of we were still beginners.
Inside my self-education I discovered PHP was, to me, a bunch between Perl, Javascript and some horrible tokens from C, and the most important thing: It had serious logical inconsistences. See it by yourself
here. Or
hereOf course PHP sucked then. There were also discussions on the web, in that what we know today as
forums. Everybody loves forums because they make feel important to insignificant people. Forums also let you streal knowledge and wisdom. The few, but. Forums to me are equal to porn, say," he-dog looks fos a she/he-dog to fund a family." Or "Please, please, help me because I am a programmer who does not knoww how to solve the difficulty of a language program". Evidence, clear lights, sound. In other words: Porn.
So there were too
PowerPoint presentations saying ,in other none polite words, the same.
The sound and he fury continued all over the years.
Here,
there, neraly everywhere.
Is there any guiltness out there? No , except for an
audience who seemed to like crap. After this. They al loved PHP, Debian, and MySQL. I was three years fighting against a language that seemed to be "perfect".
Then I was into
Python. More reasons can be foun
here, for example.
Some voices, recall that PHP sucks, even these days.
One,
two and
a recently third opinion can be read if you surf the web.
So I stopped by getting angry myself, I stooped bitng my nails, and decided that still today I might not say loudly that PHP sucks. Except for you; pretentious and absolut beginner who wants to be titled an "expert".
Have fun and enjoy yourself
here. Extend your knowledge
here.
Labels: PHP
