The PHP Singularity

An anonymous reader writes "Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror has a post about the awfulness of PHP — or, rather, a post about posts about the awfulness of PHP. He points out that PHP has been the whipping boy for the developer community for years, and while everybody seems happy to complain about it, nobody seems willing to do anything about it. He writes, 'From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious.'"

Comments

Re:Recursive?

[arth1]

PHP itself is an acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.. But then what does "PHP" stand for?

It's an old joke, already trite by the time PHP came out.

GNU = GNU is Not Unix
Wine = Wine Is Not an Emulator
PNG = PNG is Not Gif (later backronymed to Portable Network Graphics)
LAME = LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder
VISA = VISA International Service Association

Re:Recursive?

[bruce_the_loon]

PHP was originally Personal Home Page Toolkit, then backronymed into the new meaning.