Larry Wall on PHP

Found this in Stefan Fischerländer's (German) blog some time ago, and although I do not quite agree, I found it really funny. Since today is Perl's 20th birthday, I thougt it would be a good day to post that.

Larry Wall recently wrote the very amusing article "Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...". He draws a pretty darn funny line between scripting languages and programming languages. He also mentiones PHP, of course. At first, he compares PHP to JAM (Jury-rigged All-purpose Meta-language), a language Larry wrote himself, in BASIC!

JAM was an inside-out text-processing language much like PHP, except that HTML hadn't been invented yet. We mostly used it as a fancy macro processor for BASIC. Unlike PHP, it did not have 3,000 functions in one namespace. We wouldn't have had the memory, for one thing.

Alright, cheap shot. However the following cracked me up about as much as the Perl 6 release schedule:

We've also seen the rise of PHP, which takes the worse-is-better approach to dazzling new depths, as it were. By and large PHP seems to be making the same progression of mistakes as early Perl did, only slower. The one thing it does better is packaging. And when I say packaging, I don't mean namespaces.

You may agree or disagree with Larry, but the article really is a jolly good read!