Brij’s One More Idea

Adam Bosworth on programmers and those who just want to get the job done -

Consider programming itself. There is an unacknowledged war that goes
on every day in the world of programming. It is a war between the
humans and the computer scientists. It is a war between those who want
simple, sloppy, flexible, human ways to write code and those who want
clean, crisp, clear, correct ways to write code. It is the war between
PHP and C++/Java. It used to be the war between C and dBase.
Programmers at the level of those who attend Columbia University,
programmers at the level of those who have made it through the gauntlet
that is Google recruiting, programmers at the level of this audience
are all people who love precise tools, abstraction, serried ranks of
orderly propositions, and deduction. But most people writing code are
more like my son. Code is just a hammer they use to do the job. PHP is
an ideal language for them. It is easy. It is productive. It is
flexible. Associative arrays are the backbone of this language and,
like XML, is therefore flexible and self describing. They can easily
write code which dynamically adapts to the information passed in and
easily produces XML or HTML. For them, the important issue is the
content and the community, not the technology. How do they find the
right RSS feeds? How do they enable a community to collaborate, appoint
moderators, and dynamically decide whose posts can go through and whose
should be reviewed? How do they filter information by reputation? These
are the issues that they worry about, not the language.

Wonderful essay, read it and be gentle with your own biases.