[NormlOverrated]

My first language was Pascal. The concept of combining strings and integers in PHP without any conversion was scary and magical to me at first, but the damn thing worked, as long as you were careful. I still get mad at people who complain about type coercion because they expect their programming language of choice to read their minds and wipe their ass.

And Dijkstra was kidding. As is Rasmus when he says he'll restart Apache every 10 requests. Hyperbole. Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click. It has to.

[GordonS]

I think this is great comment, and I can really relate to a lot of it.

I especially liked this:

> Learn languages instead of a language and it'll click.

I started at 5 or 6 with Basic, then progressed to Object Pascal early on, then C, C++, PHP, Java and finally Javascript and C# - I believe this wide experience has served me well over my almost 30 years' of programming (Christmas I'm getting old!).

I think there is a time and a place for 'just get shit done, fast', as well as spending time building 'elegant' code. But, if anything, the compromise between these 2 is possibly the thing I struggle with most.