I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

The Terror Of The Backslash

by Jeffrey Weston, Sat Oct 25 11:48 pm, 2008

It seems somewhat isolating in the Python culture to say you still like anything about PHP. PHP is the table at the wedding where everyone the family doesn't like has to sit, quietly ignored, perhaps scoffed at behind closed doors. I do think Python is a vastly better designed and usable language -- I'm not arguing about that. I'd probably say PHP isn't so much a language as a series of tools and procedures. In technology there are waves of hip that seem to take hold, and folks often forget about the day-to-day, utilitarian, I-have-to-work-with-legacy reality -- code archaeology. Far as I'm concerned, technology is about getting things done and to work with what you have at hand, I don't care if it's a bag of chopsticks and a hot glue gun, of course I have preferences. It's the end result that really matters. I know that aesthetic is an important engineering criteria, but I also feel like sometimes engineers act like modernist architects, striving to build theoretically perfect buildings no one wants to live in (except for social cred). Originally this post was called 'Why I Don't Hate PHP Yet', but today's decision by PHP to use backslashes for seperating namespaces, is, well, deeply terrible. Could you just change concatentation to "+" and then use "."? How hard? Probably hard since this concatentation is loose and overused in PHP. Make a clean break in PHP 6? Fix it? Buck up a little? Why not "::"? I can't bring myself to type an example in the new backslash manner even as an example to see how awful it will appear. Smells like MS. It will only end in tears.