4 ms·
I thought it was odd that he says the cool kids were using Perl. I taught myself Perl from a book in the late 90s and couldn't find any kind of welcoming commun
by ukyrgf 10y ago
I thought it was odd that he says the cool kids were using Perl. I taught myself Perl from a book in the late 90s and couldn't find any kind of welcoming community on the internet, while PHP was the complete opposite. Since it was made for the web it flourished there; PHP even had user comments on its own documentation!
- colinstrickland 10y agoyeah, i'm British, and I kind of mean 'cool kids' to be a slightly self-deprecating ironic phrase. I meant that all the people I knew that were doing more interesting things seemed to be doing perl, so I followed that path. Filter bubbles were still a thing, even with less online communities
- vvanders 10y agoYup, PHP back then had one of the best documentation pages out there. It's hard to explain how big a deal it was(esp before the days of stack overflow).
- aeontech 10y agoAbsolutely! I honestly think that if PHP didn't have those incredibly accessible documentation pages, it would never have taken off in the way it did. It was StackOverflow before there was StackOverflow.
- lupin_sansei 10y agoYes it was a stroke of genius for php to add user comments to the bottom of the page describing each function/method etc. the examples in those comments were often much better than the documentation itself. I remember in early 2000s trying to persuade someone at CPAN to add comments to the bottom of CPAN, but they didn't get that they actually had to be on the page at the bottom for anyone to read them.
- segmondy 10y agoIn the late 90's the cool kids where using python. I was on the Perl bandwagon and in 1999 I bought "Learning Python" and never wrote a line of Perl again.