[abc_lisper]

Now, I have never read or written PHP. Here's the thing. PHP fills a niche. That niche is being super-productive early on. There are other goals, like, the code being readable, ease of being reasoned about, fast and so on.

And there are languages that fill those niches. When people say crappy language, more often than not, crappy for their needs(or sometimes their expertise). There is no need to fight about it; its like saying who prefers which color.

The reason you do lisp is not to do coding in it(given the current state of affairs), but to reshape one's mind by thinking in terms previously unseen because we could not see forest for the trees.

And that ability to see something from different view points arms you with weaponry to solve challenging problems. There is atleast a physicist who agrees with me on that :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfUhkSEoku0

[Shish2k]

Personally I call PHP crappy because it could easily have been much better at its main goal without sacrificing anything from its other goals, but for some reason it wasn't, and now we have to live with the stupid early decisions for compatibility reasons (eg there's no good reason for the mess of strFunc, str_func, string_func, funcstr, needle/haystack, haystack/needle, etc. When the main goal is being super-productive early on, being able to use the most basic functions without constantly looking up their order of parameters would be a great help)

[reeses]

Rasmus has clearly stated that PHP's ugliness is a feature. http://osdir.com/ml/php.devel/2002-10/msg00704.html

He freely admits that he is a crappy programmer who can't write languages. His goal was to re-use code because he hated (hates) programming.

That doesn't really explain why contributors perpetuate the atrocity, but understand that PHP is the way it is based on a set of priorities that many of us do not value.

[eksith]

Thank you for this. I fear I'll be an old man by the time I fully grasp thinking in Lisp, but I hate being defeated by my the limits of my own imagination.

Very nice video.

[abc_lisper]

You can start by watching SICP lectures freely available online :)