The Open Source swear jar

Jeff Atwood this week offered the world an article on the fact that “PHP sucks [but it doesn't matter.]” For a man who’s usually quite thoughtful, the critique presented in the article made it look like he’s been stuck on the LOST island with cached Slashdot discussions for a few years and he hit his head really hard and lost the ability to tell whether he’s actually saying anything of value or not. The substance of the apologia on the other hand – that in spite of sucking, PHP powers the web’s biggest and busiest – was put forth much more ably by Terry Chay in his thesis on the science fiction mythology behind the enterprise of the Enterprise.

However, I think Atwood has been redeemed by the fact that his piece provoked the following gem from Stanislav Malyshev: “I wish for every 50 ‘PHP sucks’ blogs people would write one good RFC.”