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Your examples of arrogance has nuance: > "For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably st

Your examples of arrogance has nuance: > "For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)" -Rasmus Lerdorf Well, he shipped, met his user's needs, met the markets needs and generally hit all the necessary bullet points to make a successful and lasting impact on the world. If he didn't meet some requirement that you have, like memory safety, its because it wasn't necessary. Checking off the required stuff and leaving the optional stuff for later is the sign of a good coder. > his lack of giving a shit about things like tests and encryption and security that are extremely important Woah there, cowboy! It turned out his take was correct, because it continued dominating over all those other technologies which cared about the thing you cared about. Being correct is better than being elegant, clean, or bug-free. > This is mostly because we have too many test failures which is primarily caused by us adding tests for bug reports before actually fixing the bug. I still like the practice of adding test cases for bugs and then working towards making the tests pass, however for some of these non-critical bugs that are taking a while to change That's just a different way of saying "We didn't have enough resources to make the fixes go quicker". What's the alternative here? Don't log the bug? Don't make a test to repro the bug? > Why didn't they simply FIX the gaping security hole in the not-so-real mysql escape string function, You sound like you've never been in a professional development shop at all. The reason that things hang around seemingly forever is because someone is using it!. It's the amateur mickey-mouse outfits that remove stuff which users are still using. It really is the equivalent of "Don't break userland". No professional worth their salt breaks their existing users without a very good reason. This is why Microsoft is still shipping broken win32 functions that were written in 1998. It's why Linus insists "Don't break userland". If you want to level up to professional level when shipping software, you're going to be shipping a lot of mistakes that you already know about. On the whole, your comment makes Rasmus look like more of a professional than you.

DonHopkins 3y ago
Your argument that it's correct to not give a shit about tests and security and encryption and memory leaks simply because lots of people are using the project is upside-down, extremely unprofessional, and downright dangerous. He shipped, but he didn't meet his users or the Internet community's needs, because his users and the Internet at large need safe reliable systems that somebody's actually bothered running the existing unit tests on, instead of security theater, Dunning-Kruger evangelism, and knee-jerk apologetics like your defeatist and fatalistic acceptance and justification of the status quo. Trotting out Win32 to justify PHP's flaws is pretty unhinged. I'm unsure you're not just a parody account. A serious person would realize they've run out of valid arguments and re-examine their priors before making such an embarrassingly bottom-of-the-barrel justification. Thomas Midgley Jr. also shipped and made a lasting impact on the world. Changing the world is not the only measure of success, nor justification of harmful impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. >His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster". PHP is the CFC of programming languages.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Your argument that it's correct to not give a shit about tests and security and encryption and memory leaks simply because lots of people are using the project That's not my argument. My argument is that while you might give a shit about $THINGS-DON-LIKES in code, the actual market is requiring much more stringent sink-or-swim product decisions. So, yeah, for you what the market values in that product may be irrelevant to what you value in that code. > He shipped, but he didn't meet his users or the Internet community's needs, Obviously he did - he dominated over other languages, even though PHP had next to no marketing budget and was competing against products that had millions, or hundreds of millions, spent on marketing. The market clearly preferred the product he provided. > because his users and the Internet at large need safe reliable systems that Your opinion on what those users needed differs greatly from what those user's expressed that they needed. What $DON thinks other people need is irrelevant when those same other people have opinions of their own. > I'm unsure you're not just a parody account. I'm sure you do. I'm not sure how that is relevant. You're once again making the mistake of assuming that your opinion is actually relevant. It's not, to this argument, relevant at all. All your skepticism about my intention only digresses from the main argument, which is what you thought was good for product delivery turned out to be rejected by the market. > [snipped digression] The long and short of it is, your acerbic opinion on what the market needed in 1998 differed greatly from what the market actually chose. Now, you might make a different argument: that the user's should have chosen a better product. But the argument you made was that the product made the wrong trade-offs when trading off security for existence. To my my knowledge, there is no product in the world that makes the trade-off you suggest[1], which is what lead me to believe that you have never been part of a product development. [1] Remember that even Microsoft made the "make it first, then make it secure" decision with almost their entire product line since the 80s. When the richest companies in the world are making this sort of decision and successfully delivering world-dominating products, there's no question of "Is Don wrong?", it's more a question of "When will Don realise it?"
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
    No, you're not a serious or professional person. And you don't use dashes in environment variable names, you use underscores.

DonHopkins 3y ago

Your argument that it's correct to not give a shit about tests and security and encryption and memory leaks simply because lots of people are using the project is upside-down, extremely unprofessional, and downright dangerous. He shipped, but he didn't meet his users or the Internet community's needs, because his users and the Internet at large need safe reliable systems that somebody's actually bothered running the existing unit tests on, instead of security theater, Dunning-Kruger evangelism, and knee-jerk apologetics like your defeatist and fatalistic acceptance and justification of the status quo. Trotting out Win32 to justify PHP's flaws is pretty unhinged. I'm unsure you're not just a parody account. A serious person would realize they've run out of valid arguments and re-examine their priors before making such an embarrassingly bottom-of-the-barrel justification. Thomas Midgley Jr. also shipped and made a lasting impact on the world. Changing the world is not the only measure of success, nor justification of harmful impact. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr. >His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster". PHP is the CFC of programming languages.

lelanthran 3y ago
> Your argument that it's correct to not give a shit about tests and security and encryption and memory leaks simply because lots of people are using the project That's not my argument. My argument is that while you might give a shit about $THINGS-DON-LIKES in code, the actual market is requiring much more stringent sink-or-swim product decisions. So, yeah, for you what the market values in that product may be irrelevant to what you value in that code. > He shipped, but he didn't meet his users or the Internet community's needs, Obviously he did - he dominated over other languages, even though PHP had next to no marketing budget and was competing against products that had millions, or hundreds of millions, spent on marketing. The market clearly preferred the product he provided. > because his users and the Internet at large need safe reliable systems that Your opinion on what those users needed differs greatly from what those user's expressed that they needed. What $DON thinks other people need is irrelevant when those same other people have opinions of their own. > I'm unsure you're not just a parody account. I'm sure you do. I'm not sure how that is relevant. You're once again making the mistake of assuming that your opinion is actually relevant. It's not, to this argument, relevant at all. All your skepticism about my intention only digresses from the main argument, which is what you thought was good for product delivery turned out to be rejected by the market. > [snipped digression] The long and short of it is, your acerbic opinion on what the market needed in 1998 differed greatly from what the market actually chose. Now, you might make a different argument: that the user's should have chosen a better product. But the argument you made was that the product made the wrong trade-offs when trading off security for existence. To my my knowledge, there is no product in the world that makes the trade-off you suggest[1], which is what lead me to believe that you have never been part of a product development. [1] Remember that even Microsoft made the "make it first, then make it secure" decision with almost their entire product line since the 80s. When the richest companies in the world are making this sort of decision and successfully delivering world-dominating products, there's no question of "Is Don wrong?", it's more a question of "When will Don realise it?"
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  No, you're not a serious or professional person. And you don't use dashes in environment variable names, you use underscores.