>>How about if I preferred that only voters who understood lawyers and politicians were allowed to vote, since they are blissfully unaware of certain legal realities? It's just as farcical an opinion as yours.
Now it is you who are being just a little disingenuous. I never ever said that legal or political experience is a *negative* thing, just that I would like for politicians to have other outside experience. I certainly still think legal or political experience is a positive thing to look for in a political leader.
Think of it this way: I know a few architects. Some of those architects also spent a certain amount of time laboring on constructions sites and running their own small construction projects. They have an inside experiential edge on those architects who have only spent their time on design and theory, or if you will "book knowledge". They often have no idea how some small change in the plans can cause a major problem in production, because they haven't *done* any production. It's a simple thing; I'm not making absolutes, just saying there are practical benefits to a broader experience.
No, I don't fear lawyers any more than I fear politicians. It's a job that can be done honorably or dishonorably. My point: someone who has *only* done law is akin to someone who has only done politics; they might not be in the best position to understand some aspects of life. I am just saying that in a leader of a country, I want someone who has at least spent a little bit of time doing work that actually *produces* something. Farming, sales, business, construction, whatever... Otherwise, IMHO, there is a tendency to be blissfully unaware of certain economic realities (as in: money doesn't grow on trees, and we can't all just talk our way into prosperity).
Please. As if that one incident determines everything. That's another thing I am very tired of in modern politics. One stupic moment *becomes* everything we need to know about a person. As much as I am not a Kerry supporter, I am sick of hearing how he throws a baseball like a girlie man. So what?
But anyway:
1. Think about the age of the person involved. When he was a lowly working guy, there was no such thing as a laser scanner. By the time someone is President, I'm fairly happy to have him or her delegate shopping to someone else.
2. Furthermore, that vignette has been thoroughly debunked.
Well, of course it depends on what you mean by "regular". But I say it has indeed happened, even in this century. Admittedly some of it was in the tradition of rich kids who are decide to "start at the bottom", but that is still better than complete insularity. For example, the elder George Bush sold tires as a traveling salesman in Texas, among several other mid-level jobs, before going into oil, and then politics. Point is, I'm looking for at least something to help them understand how the world works outside Washington. Not necessary that they should all have been street sweepers, but to be able to successfully take orders and carry out a job, rather than make a life on pontification and schmoozing.
By the same token I am much more interested in a governor running for President than a Senator. Governers actually have to manage something.
It continually steams me that a person who has never held a regular job (such as Clinton), would be considered the person who best serves the needs of all those people out there with regular jobs.
Yes, political experience is good, but a politician with no other experience is NOT to be trusted. I will add that politicians whose only "regular" job has been as a trial attorney or some such is almost as suspect, because they deal in the same currency as politicians.
When the experience of the incumbents is simply a lifetime of learning how to trade more and more of our rights for power, then I agree that experience is crap.
Actually there are many companies and projects using the Mozilla platform these days. I use it every day at my job these days. Some examples out there:
Sunbird -- calendaring system Nvu -- web authoring system Oeone -- Linux desktop Komodo -- programmer's editor/IDE
And tons of other small projects are available as Mozilla or Firefox extensions at www.mozdev.org and other sites.
Thank you, yes. Most good sci-fi writers are not nearly so pretentious as to think their work is about predicting the future, but simply about exploring themes in life, and as a side-effect hopefully using the imagination to explore possibilities in future life. The best sci-fi is still about characters and character development, not about the science itself. Even Asimov, the patrician father of hard sci-fi does some great literary work in character development. Also look at Heinlein, Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith. Many of their scientific concepts are completely dated, but still the books are well worth reading, because interestingly, exploration of human character never seems to get dated.
I think the problem with current sci-fi is similar to the problem with most current movies: character development is very thin, pushed aside by special effects, gratuitous violence, mysticism, and pandering to cheap philosophical sentiment. Robert Sawyer is one of the few SF writers out there in the old tradition.
Now, writers like Michael Crichton tend to write about Concepts, and you can see it in the one-dimensional nature of their characters. (Crichton tries hard in Sphere and Timeline, but still doesn't quite get there). I have to even place Larry Niven in that category, just barely. In other words, the writers in the first category are writing things that should be destined to be considered true *novels*, while books in the second category somehow seem more like essays on certain ideas, using a story as a device to present the idea.
Then of course there is the third category, which is just pure escapism, either with shoot-em-up violence, insipid sexuality or mystical fantasy. I think this third category has possibly come to dominate most of the sci-fi books in the bookstores, unfortunately.
Very interesting... The only serious third-party candidate out there is a geek;-):
"Michael J. Badnarik (born August 1, 1954) is an American software engineer and political figure. He is the Libertarian Party (a third party) nominee for President of the United States in the 2004 elections."
I found in interesting to note from his website that he actually advocated a mild form of civil disobedience. Slashdotters should be paying more attention to Badnarik. He might even have a rational approach to intellectual property.
Re:The Genius of Fabian (Fabian contra mundi)
on
Fabian Pascal Reacts
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, it is exactly that side of Pascal's persona (the Chomskyite side) that makes it so hard to see the value of his real accomplishments. Those he can't convince are automatically members of the mindless free-market apparatchik, and those he can convince are the brave but pitiable few who will be ground up and spit out by the soulless machine of modern commerce. Either way, you lose, it seems; and I think Pascal somehow wants it to be that way.
Note that if you are one of the people out there who actually makes a habit of approaching new ideas with interest, and happen to be convinced by the logical arguments he makes (as I did, before I was distracted by all the politics and personality), you will probably be quite disappointed if you send any note of actual encouragement to him. The response almost always takes a negative tack.
Quite unfortunate, really. While I think the objective truth of the phenomemon he talks about happens quite often (marginalized by a conventional-thinking public, etc...), there is no great conspiracy here. There are just people deciding what they want to deal with and what they don't. I was a geek in high school. I know what it is like to be shunned by the popular crowd, and to inwardly seethe at their shallow cultivated ignorance. Most poeple prefer mediocrity. The job of any great thinker or artist is to help people see a way past mediocrity, but that can't be done by force. And it really can't be done if you hate or despise those you are trying to convince. Unfortunately, the downside of a democracy is that people might do and think things you don't like. Thus, the only way to... get your way is to convince people agreeably. Even if you are right, forcing people to agree with you is wrong. But maybe Pascal disagrees. Maybe we should have some sort of utopian socialism ruled by the intelligentsia (do the 'intelligentsia' ever conceive of it any other way?). Yes, and then the government can appoint Pascal a seat on the National Education Board, or something like that, which will lay down the 'guidelines' about what will be taught in the schools and universities. I can see the exhaustive tests and questionnaires that every computer science professor will have to fill out. And of course the appropriate punishments will have to be meted out in order to silence dissent on this matter. But of course this will have to be done, because a free market (for money OR ideas) will lead some to ignore the obviously true principles of logic, thus allowing some to have wrong conjectures, and intellectual anarchy will result!
See the essential dichotomy of Pascal's argument here? On the one side, he lauds anyone with the mental self-reliance to escape the Trap of Commercialized Education, but on the other side, he decries a system that allows people to make up their own minds about what they will buy, do with their lives, and ultimately, believe (if I correctly read between the lines on his many comments about education). As if somehow people are powerless to make up their own minds in anything.
Oh, and read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals for a glimpse at the world of Noam Chomsky and other great minds of the past 2 centuries. Quite revealing in how these people are so willing to sacrifice real people for the sake of their theoretical constructs. Why do so many intellectuals, great in one very specific area of endeavor, think that somehow qualifies them to judge every other area of life?
Oops, I'm sorry. It's "XFree86 -Configure" (notice the capital F).
Yes, it is unfortunate that all the cool shortcuts in Linux/Unix tend to take years to discover. I really didn't know about it until I had been using FreeBSD for 3 years. Of course, reading the XFree86 manual would have helped...;-)
Well, FreeBSD is really not "about" the desktop yet. But, it's worth noting that in the past when I just ran "Xfree86 -Configure", my video card was detected 99% of the time. This is a feature of XFree86, not the OS. So I pretty much religiously ignore the X configuration tools in the installer and just stick with that simple method. Now, given that FreeBSD has switched to X.org, I don't know how this sort of thing works, but I'm willing to bet there is a similar command.
MySQL doesn't feature anything remotely like ANSI-standard SQL behavior. Migrating from MySQL to any other SQL DBMS is much harder than migrating between all the other major DBMS's put together. MySQL is the odd man out, here.
I would think that in Economics "value" is defined by the user. Quality is also an abstract concept, but it is definitely not defined simply by how many people choose something. Who would argue that McDonald's is high quality, even if they regularly eat McDonald's?
Actually, there is nothing non-relational about the idea of a distributed foreign key. It has even been proposed by some ardent "defenders" of the relational model: Hugh Darwen (colleague of C.J. Date) mentions this as a desirable feature in his presentation How to Handle Missing Information without Using Nulls
PostgreSQL does cache query plans one a "per connection" basis. In other words, not over the long term, but if you call the same stored procedure twice in a row, the second call will be cached. Also, there are parameters about how you create a function/procedure that affects the amount of caching.
Another thing to remember about PostgreSQL is the built-in genetic query optimizer, which continually collects stats about queries and adjusts optimization.
"8 bit clean"? Oh, now you've convinced me... So the fact that I have the inconvenience of running my data through escape_bytea() before storing it as a binary string is THE major reason why PostgreSQL shouldn't be used? That discounts anything else about what a DBMS should do?
Yeah, PostgreSQL doesn't support 'standard' data types, and MySQL does? I really hope someone isn't reading this thinking you are serious. (You are not serious, are you?). MySQL's support for real datatype constraints is so bad that it should be considered typeless.
The whole point of a serious DBMS like PostgreSQL is not to allow your data to do things it shouldn't. If you don't want constraints or real data integrity, then fine; Use MySQL. Just be aware that your application still has to reimplement half the things that the DBMS normally handles.
Uhh... "apparently" what? Oh! I see... hehehe... and all this time, they had no idea they were operating with such a flawed SQL parser. No wonder they had to go to all the trouble to implement 6 procedural languages, as well as their extended RULE system, custom datatype capability, etc... Poor guys...
PostgreSQL doesn't do "implicit" set-returning like this, but it is quite ease to get something almost as simple if you use SQL as your procedural language, instead of PL/pgSQL:
create function GetEmployees?() returns setof employee as select * from employee; language 'sql';
PHP has had a database abstraction library as a loadable/compilable extension for years (dbx). It has a very small function list, which I consider a strength rather than a weakness, since it allows everything actually needed to interact with an SQL DBMS. I personally really like DBX, and wish it was always enabled by default.
Also, PHP 5 has a new abstraction library which is available in PECL, called PDO.
Yes, I know these are not enabled "by default", but given that Perl's largest DB abstraction library is also a module, rather than a core component, any complaint vis-a-vis Perl/PHP DB abstraction is moot.
Anyone here tried DBMail? I know it doesn't have the features of a full groupware server, but it looks promising, in that everything-- addresses, email content, etc... is stored in a PostgreSQL or MySQL database, and it supports Imap. Apparently for version 2.x, they are planning shared folders, etc... Also, it seems to be much simpler to install than these other behemoths. Worth trying?
And I completely agree on the concept of "useful complexity". That's what it really comes down to, and it depends on the type of work you are doing. For example, many developers use MySQL because of its simplicity, while I find the relative complexity of PostgreSQL *extremely* useful, to the point that I pretty much can't live without it. It's all about choosing your battles.
Well... hehe. You have pretty well described the lay of the land, except for your last question. I still wonder myself sometimes, but there is definitely something about PHP that just makes it sooo easy to get things going with it. It's by no means the most elegant language out there (I have actually been toying with Python, although I find some things about it very irritating too).
In fact, I think PHP's previous simplicity and 'under-featuredness' with regards to OOP are actually what made it so popular. It's not like Java, where you have to not only understand language syntax, but absorb a large piece of documentation on the "foundation classes", and who knows what other standard libs. It's not like Perl, where you have to get all kinds of oddness firmly fixed in your head in order to really be proficient (not that Perl isn't fun--its probably the most fun scripting language out there).
Also, there are people, like me, who are just a little skeptical of the grand benefits of OOP, especially when you are doing applications which can express business logic in a database like PostgreSQL. IMHO relational logic is the ultimate way to handle the business needs of an organization, and I don't buy the whole object-relational mapping thing. So in that sense, I don't depend on PHP to handle the grand scheme of things, but to handle the messy details of displaying data, taking user input, dynamically buidling HTML, etc... PHP tends to make messy details easy, which again is because of it's "bad" features like weak typing, using the same prefix on all variables (unlike Perl), easy array access and manipulation, etc...
Also, I have recently been doing some serious client-side scripting in PHP (sockets, Unix system stuff, etc..), and it is quite nice. The only oddity there is the need to enclose all PHP code in the tags, but I'm sure that will be an optional thing sooner or later.
Oh, and the other part of the 'secret sauce' is that PHP is so easy to install on just about any operating system out there. Can't complain about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't even try; your irony is lost on most of the O-O crowd. Many are doubtless reading your comments and nodding their heads sagely in agreement.
>>How about if I preferred that only voters who understood lawyers and politicians were allowed to vote, since they are blissfully unaware of certain legal realities? It's just as farcical an opinion as yours.
Now it is you who are being just a little disingenuous. I never ever said that legal or political experience is a *negative* thing, just that I would like for politicians to have other outside experience. I certainly still think legal or political experience is a positive thing to look for in a political leader.
Think of it this way: I know a few architects. Some of those architects also spent a certain amount of time laboring on constructions sites and running their own small construction projects. They have an inside experiential edge on those architects who have only spent their time on design and theory, or if you will "book knowledge". They often have no idea how some small change in the plans can cause a major problem in production, because they haven't *done* any production. It's a simple thing; I'm not making absolutes, just saying there are practical benefits to a broader experience.
No, I don't fear lawyers any more than I fear politicians. It's a job that can be done honorably or dishonorably. My point: someone who has *only* done law is akin to someone who has only done politics; they might not be in the best position to understand some aspects of life. I am just saying that in a leader of a country, I want someone who has at least spent a little bit of time doing work that actually *produces* something. Farming, sales, business, construction, whatever... Otherwise, IMHO, there is a tendency to be blissfully unaware of certain economic realities (as in: money doesn't grow on trees, and we can't all just talk our way into prosperity).
Please. As if that one incident determines everything. That's another thing I am very tired of in modern politics. One stupic moment *becomes* everything we need to know about a person. As much as I am not a Kerry supporter, I am sick of hearing how he throws a baseball like a girlie man. So what?
But anyway:
1. Think about the age of the person involved. When he was a lowly working guy, there was no such thing as a laser scanner. By the time someone is President, I'm fairly happy to have him or her delegate shopping to someone else.
2. Furthermore, that vignette has been thoroughly debunked.
Well, of course it depends on what you mean by "regular". But I say it has indeed happened, even in this century. Admittedly some of it was in the tradition of rich kids who are decide to "start at the bottom", but that is still better than complete insularity. For example, the elder George Bush sold tires as a traveling salesman in Texas, among several other mid-level jobs, before going into oil, and then politics. Point is, I'm looking for at least something to help them understand how the world works outside Washington. Not necessary that they should all have been street sweepers, but to be able to successfully take orders and carry out a job, rather than make a life on pontification and schmoozing.
By the same token I am much more interested in a governor running for President than a Senator. Governers actually have to manage something.
Thank you, yes!
It continually steams me that a person who has never held a regular job (such as Clinton), would be considered the person who best serves the needs of all those people out there with regular jobs.
Yes, political experience is good, but a politician with no other experience is NOT to be trusted. I will add that politicians whose only "regular" job has been as a trial attorney or some such is almost as suspect, because they deal in the same currency as politicians.
When the experience of the incumbents is simply a lifetime of learning how to trade more and more of our rights for power, then I agree that experience is crap.
Actually there are many companies and projects using the Mozilla platform these days. I use it every day at my job these days. Some examples out there:
Sunbird -- calendaring system
Nvu -- web authoring system
Oeone -- Linux desktop
Komodo -- programmer's editor/IDE
And tons of other small projects are available as Mozilla or Firefox extensions at www.mozdev.org and other sites.
Thank you, yes. Most good sci-fi writers are not nearly so pretentious as to think their work is about predicting the future, but simply about exploring themes in life, and as a side-effect hopefully using the imagination to explore possibilities in future life. The best sci-fi is still about characters and character development, not about the science itself. Even Asimov, the patrician father of hard sci-fi does some great literary work in character development. Also look at Heinlein, Jack Vance, Cordwainer Smith. Many of their scientific concepts are completely dated, but still the books are well worth reading, because interestingly, exploration of human character never seems to get dated.
I think the problem with current sci-fi is similar to the problem with most current movies: character development is very thin, pushed aside by special effects, gratuitous violence, mysticism, and pandering to cheap philosophical sentiment. Robert Sawyer is one of the few SF writers out there in the old tradition.
Now, writers like Michael Crichton tend to write about Concepts, and you can see it in the one-dimensional nature of their characters. (Crichton tries hard in Sphere and Timeline, but still doesn't quite get there). I have to even place Larry Niven in that category, just barely. In other words, the writers in the first category are writing things that should be destined to be considered true *novels*, while books in the second category somehow seem more like essays on certain ideas, using a story as a device to present the idea.
Then of course there is the third category, which is just pure escapism, either with shoot-em-up violence, insipid sexuality or mystical fantasy. I think this third category has possibly come to dominate most of the sci-fi books in the bookstores, unfortunately.
Very interesting... The only serious third-party candidate out there is a geek ;-):
"Michael J. Badnarik (born August 1, 1954) is an American software engineer and political figure. He is the Libertarian Party (a third party) nominee for President of the United States in the 2004 elections."
I found in interesting to note from his website that he actually advocated a mild form of civil disobedience. Slashdotters should be paying more attention to Badnarik. He might even have a rational approach to intellectual property.
Yes, it is exactly that side of Pascal's persona (the Chomskyite side) that makes it so hard to see the value of his real accomplishments. Those he can't convince are automatically members of the mindless free-market apparatchik, and those he can convince are the brave but pitiable few who will be ground up and spit out by the soulless machine of modern commerce. Either way, you lose, it seems; and I think Pascal somehow wants it to be that way.
Note that if you are one of the people out there who actually makes a habit of approaching new ideas with interest, and happen to be convinced by the logical arguments he makes (as I did, before I was distracted by all the politics and personality), you will probably be quite disappointed if you send any note of actual encouragement to him. The response almost always takes a negative tack.
Quite unfortunate, really. While I think the objective truth of the phenomemon he talks about happens quite often (marginalized by a conventional-thinking public, etc...), there is no great conspiracy here. There are just people deciding what they want to deal with and what they don't. I was a geek in high school. I know what it is like to be shunned by the popular crowd, and to inwardly seethe at their shallow cultivated ignorance. Most poeple prefer mediocrity. The job of any great thinker or artist is to help people see a way past mediocrity, but that can't be done by force. And it really can't be done if you hate or despise those you are trying to convince. Unfortunately, the downside of a democracy is that people might do and think things you don't like. Thus, the only way to... get your way is to convince people agreeably. Even if you are right, forcing people to agree with you is wrong. But maybe Pascal disagrees. Maybe we should have some sort of utopian socialism ruled by the intelligentsia (do the 'intelligentsia' ever conceive of it any other way?). Yes, and then the government can appoint Pascal a seat on the National Education Board, or something like that, which will lay down the 'guidelines' about what will be taught in the schools and universities. I can see the exhaustive tests and questionnaires that every computer science professor will have to fill out. And of course the appropriate punishments will have to be meted out in order to silence dissent on this matter. But of course this will have to be done, because a free market (for money OR ideas) will lead some to ignore the obviously true principles of logic, thus allowing some to have wrong conjectures, and intellectual anarchy will result!
See the essential dichotomy of Pascal's argument here? On the one side, he lauds anyone with the mental self-reliance to escape the Trap of Commercialized Education, but on the other side, he decries a system that allows people to make up their own minds about what they will buy, do with their lives, and ultimately, believe (if I correctly read between the lines on his many comments about education). As if somehow people are powerless to make up their own minds in anything.
Oh, and read Paul Johnson's Intellectuals for a glimpse at the world of Noam Chomsky and other great minds of the past 2 centuries. Quite revealing in how these people are so willing to sacrifice real people for the sake of their theoretical constructs. Why do so many intellectuals, great in one very specific area of endeavor, think that somehow qualifies them to judge every other area of life?
Oops, I'm sorry. It's "XFree86 -Configure" (notice the capital F).
... ;-)
Yes, it is unfortunate that all the cool shortcuts in Linux/Unix tend to take years to discover. I really didn't know about it until I had been using FreeBSD for 3 years. Of course, reading the XFree86 manual would have helped
Well, FreeBSD is really not "about" the desktop yet. But, it's worth noting that in the past when I just ran "Xfree86 -Configure", my video card was detected 99% of the time. This is a feature of XFree86, not the OS. So I pretty much religiously ignore the X configuration tools in the installer and just stick with that simple method. Now, given that FreeBSD has switched to X.org, I don't know how this sort of thing works, but I'm willing to bet there is a similar command.
MySQL Gotchas
MySQL doesn't feature anything remotely like ANSI-standard SQL behavior. Migrating from MySQL to any other SQL DBMS is much harder than migrating between all the other major DBMS's put together. MySQL is the odd man out, here.
I would think that in Economics "value" is defined by the user. Quality is also an abstract concept, but it is definitely not defined simply by how many people choose something. Who would argue that McDonald's is high quality, even if they regularly eat McDonald's?
Actually, there is nothing non-relational about the idea of a distributed foreign key. It has even been proposed by some ardent "defenders" of the relational model: Hugh Darwen (colleague of C.J. Date) mentions this as a desirable feature in his presentation How to Handle Missing Information without Using Nulls
PostgreSQL does cache query plans one a "per connection" basis. In other words, not over the long term, but if you call the same stored procedure twice in a row, the second call will be cached. Also, there are parameters about how you create a function/procedure that affects the amount of caching.
Another thing to remember about PostgreSQL is the built-in genetic query optimizer, which continually collects stats about queries and adjusts optimization.
"8 bit clean"? Oh, now you've convinced me... So the fact that I have the inconvenience of running my data through escape_bytea() before storing it as a binary string is THE major reason why PostgreSQL shouldn't be used? That discounts anything else about what a DBMS should do?
Yeah, PostgreSQL doesn't support 'standard' data types, and MySQL does? I really hope someone isn't reading this thinking you are serious. (You are not serious, are you?). MySQL's support for real datatype constraints is so bad that it should be considered typeless.
The whole point of a serious DBMS like PostgreSQL is not to allow your data to do things it shouldn't. If you don't want constraints or real data integrity, then fine; Use MySQL. Just be aware that your application still has to reimplement half the things that the DBMS normally handles.
Uhh... "apparently" what? Oh! I see... hehehe... and all this time, they had no idea they were operating with such a flawed SQL parser. No wonder they had to go to all the trouble to implement 6 procedural languages, as well as their extended RULE system, custom datatype capability, etc... Poor guys...
;-)]
[Nice troll...
Try PGAdmin III.
Nice parallel, and cool python easter egg ;).
PHP has had a database abstraction library as a loadable/compilable extension for years (dbx). It has a very small function list, which I consider a strength rather than a weakness, since it allows everything actually needed to interact with an SQL DBMS. I personally really like DBX, and wish it was always enabled by default.
Also, PHP 5 has a new abstraction library which is available in PECL, called PDO.
Yes, I know these are not enabled "by default", but given that Perl's largest DB abstraction library is also a module, rather than a core component, any complaint vis-a-vis Perl/PHP DB abstraction is moot.
Anyone here tried DBMail? I know it doesn't have the features of a full groupware server, but it looks promising, in that everything-- addresses, email content, etc... is stored in a PostgreSQL or MySQL database, and it supports Imap. Apparently for version 2.x, they are planning shared folders, etc... Also, it seems to be much simpler to install than these other behemoths. Worth trying?
Ditto ;)
And I completely agree on the concept of "useful complexity". That's what it really comes down to, and it depends on the type of work you are doing. For example, many developers use MySQL because of its simplicity, while I find the relative complexity of PostgreSQL *extremely* useful, to the point that I pretty much can't live without it. It's all about choosing your battles.
Well... hehe. You have pretty well described the lay of the land, except for your last question. I still wonder myself sometimes, but there is definitely something about PHP that just makes it sooo easy to get things going with it. It's by no means the most elegant language out there (I have actually been toying with Python, although I find some things about it very irritating too).
In fact, I think PHP's previous simplicity and 'under-featuredness' with regards to OOP are actually what made it so popular. It's not like Java, where you have to not only understand language syntax, but absorb a large piece of documentation on the "foundation classes", and who knows what other standard libs. It's not like Perl, where you have to get all kinds of oddness firmly fixed in your head in order to really be proficient (not that Perl isn't fun--its probably the most fun scripting language out there).
Also, there are people, like me, who are just a little skeptical of the grand benefits of OOP, especially when you are doing applications which can express business logic in a database like PostgreSQL. IMHO relational logic is the ultimate way to handle the business needs of an organization, and I don't buy the whole object-relational mapping thing. So in that sense, I don't depend on PHP to handle the grand scheme of things, but to handle the messy details of displaying data, taking user input, dynamically buidling HTML, etc... PHP tends to make messy details easy, which again is because of it's "bad" features like weak typing, using the same prefix on all variables (unlike Perl), easy array access and manipulation, etc...
Also, I have recently been doing some serious client-side scripting in PHP (sockets, Unix system stuff, etc..), and it is quite nice. The only oddity there is the need to enclose all PHP code in the tags, but I'm sure that will be an optional thing sooner or later.
Oh, and the other part of the 'secret sauce' is that PHP is so easy to install on just about any operating system out there. Can't complain about that.