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As a developer, I’m a heavy Firefox user, but Google’s Chrome browser is pretty awesome for day-to-day browsing. Since it syncs with all my cookies and saved passwords from Firefox, I can use the two interchangeably. It starts up and loads pages super fast, and has the cleanest menu I’ve seen yet.

I’ve started recommending it to all my non-techie friends, albeit with one caveat: I have to explain the popup blocking behavior.

Chrome’s “blocked popup” warning is super-subtle – just a small, light blue rectangle in the lower right corner. Once a popup has been blocked, additional popups alerts don’t cause any additional action, the number of blocks merely ticks up. Worse, if you click the X in the corner of the alert, the box doesn’t come again until your restart the browser.

Finally, you may review all the blocked popups by clicking the alert. However the very first option in the list from the bottom (remember that we’re in the lower right corner) is a checkbox to disable popup notification entirely. I wonder how many people click that accidentally and never even notice. If this describes you, Google has a Help Center article describing how to change the setting back.

Of the modern browsers, I think Google comes in dead last when it comes to popup blocking. Their blocking logic is fantastic, try getting one to appear from PopupTest.com. But the performance doesn’t mean a damn thing if the interface implementation sucks.

While I hate to admit it, IE set a good standard with the slide-down alert that appears in the margin between site content and the menu, and Firefox followed suit. It’s across the top in highlight yellow. Impossible to miss. Furthermore, the alert only allows direct bypass of popups from the affected site; there’s no way to directly disable all alerts, temporarily or permanently.

The reality is that Firefox and IE have unofficially set a default for blocking popups, and now people are used to it. I always appreciate Google’s re-evaluation of the status quo; their ability to question the why and how and then look for better alternatives is really their greatest asset. But they are fighting the tide in this case:

Furthermore, once a default becomes a well-accepted standard, it’s an expectation. Other vendors will be peer pressured into at least matching that default. And to truly succeed, they’ll have to come up with an even better default. Defaults are how the software industry evolves.

In this case, Google failed to come up with a better default. Admittedly, this is a small step, and Google’s track record in such matters speaks for itself. No one’s perfect, and hopefully we’ll see a more standardized implementation in future versions.

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Jeff Atwood’s latest post on Coding Horror provides great insight into the history and mindset of one of the Computer Science greats, Alan Kay. It’s a good read for any computer professional looking to delve further into the advances that Kay worked on.

Unfortunately, Jeff has a pretty strong distaste of PHP, and blindly jumps on a perceived opportunity to back up his case. He cites an ACM Queue article where Kay discusses why software development does not happen faster. Here’s the important section that Atwood quoted. Bolding is Atwood’s emphasis:

Let’s say the adoption of programming languages has very often been somewhat accidental, and the emphasis has very often been on how easy it is to implement the programming language rather than on its actual merits and features. For instance, Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

He follows his citation with this comment:

Any similarity between the above and PHP is, I’m sure, completely coincidental. That sound you’re hearing is just a little bit of history repeating.

His link here goes to an earlier post where he lambastes PHP for, well, existing really. I took issue with the post at the time, finding several glaring holes in his logic and generally disagreeing with the premise (obviously). I replied in the comments (look for my name), and expounded further in a rebuttal post on my own site. I didn’t let him get away with unfounded arguments then, and I’m not going to now.

In the ACM Queue article, Alan Kay discusses the evolution of programming languages. He and his colleagues expected the next big leap in programming language structure to occur somewhere around 1984, with the introduction of a new generation of programmers. It never happened — to Kay’s satisfaction, anyway — and he believes that commercial software development doomed this advancement, and has stagnated the evolution of programming theory. This leads to Jeff’s quote and PHP quip.

Two problems here. First, Kay was discussing evolutionary leaps, not the quality of the current crop. Kay doesn’t know how language theory will evolve, he’s waiting for someone to come along with the next bright idea (otherwise he would have done it, duh). Labeling any current language as subpar simply because someone theorizes “we can do better” is complete non-sequitor. I believe Kay knows this and his words in the article back it up.

To put it another way, using Atwood’s logic, wouldn’t VB.NET would fall into the same category of failure? Kay may not be worshiping at the altar of PHP, but I don’t see him anywhere near Microsoft’s temple either.

Second, PHP is successful because of its merits, not in spite of their lacking. Jeff needs to read the Wikipedia article on PHP. The very first paragraph on the page reads:

PHP originally stood for Personal Home Page. It began in 1994 as a set of Common Gateway Interface binaries written in the C programming language by the Danish/Greenlandic programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. Lerdorf initially created these Personal Home Page Tools to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. The tools were used to perform tasks such as displaying his résumé and recording how much traffic his page was receiving. He combined these binaries with his Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI, which had more functionality. PHP/FI included a larger implementation for the C programming language and could communicate with databases, enabling the building of simple, dynamic web applications. Lerdorf released PHP publicly on June 8, 1995 to accelerate bug location and improve the code. This release was named PHP version 2 and already had the basic functionality that PHP has today. This included Perl-like variables, form handling, and the ability to embed HTML. The syntax was similar to Perl but was more limited, simpler, and less consistent.

PHP is 100% grass-roots success, starting out as one guy’s collection of useful tools for building websites. I refuse to believe that, in this age of abundant choice, all these programmers picked up PHP because it was “easy.” The numbers are just too big, features and power must enter into the equation at some point.

Nonetheless, Atwood’s application of Kay’s quote would lead you to believe that PHP exists because Zend Technologies pushed the language financially, just as GE backed BASIC. The truth is exactly the opposite: Zend Technologies exists because of PHP’s overwhelming success. Coming from a hard core VB.NET programmer, I find the insinuation here a little insulting; Zend Technologies is hardly MS Borg.

When it comes to having a discussion about programming philosophy, I wouldn’t even put myself in the room with Kay. I don’t know enough on programming language evolution to even join the discussion. Atwood, on the other hand, gets too close to the fire and gets burned. He erroneously applies Kay’s argument to his own beliefs which, when scrutinized, deflate much like the previous one.

This is the second time now Jeff has taken a unfounded shot at PHP. The complete lack of substance behind his claims make him look like nothing more than your average “my language is better than yours” fan boy. I could ignore it, but his audience is large enough to effect real influence. So like anyone else in a position of power, he must be called on the outlandish claims.

I read your blog all the time, Jeff, I know you can do better than this.

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I’m a huge fan of Jeff Atwood and his blog, Coding Horror. He writes in a very approachable manner, using a down-to-earth tone and easy-to-follow examples. He offers useful information to new and experienced coders alike. It’s the one blog I am sure to check on a daily basis. On more than one occasion, Jeff has made an insightful post about a topic that was paramount to a project I was working on. If you’ve never read his work, I can highly recommend the articles on SQL Joins, why upgrades aren’t always a good idea, passing the elevator test, and why the developer’s always at fault.

But the other day, a rare event occurred: Jeff made a claim with which I wholeheartedly disagreed. The post title, PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter, speaks for itself. Jeff lambastes the language on the whole, while freely admitting to its overwhelming success. The key quote:

I’ve written both VB and PHP code, and in my opinion the comparison is grossly unfair to Visual Basic. Does PHP suck? Of course it sucks. Did you read any of the links in Tim’s blog entry? It’s a galactic supernova of incomprehensibly colossal, mind-bendingly awful suck. If you sit down to program in PHP and have even an ounce of programming talent in your entire body, there’s no possible way to draw any other conclusion. It’s inescapable.

Well then I pulled off a movie-style escape, Jeff. I think the language is a success due to its design, and not in spite of itself. As a professional PHP developer, I think I’m also a bit more qualified than Jeff to comment on the strengths of the language.

Now, almost any discussion revolving around the pros and cons of a coding language can quickly devolve into angry flaming. Jeff of course avoids this pitfall, and I’m going to follow the same spirit of high discourse here. I’ve got two main concerns: there’s some severely flawed logic in the post, and Jeff completely disregards the many strengths of PHP, either deliberately or out of ignorance.

I responded to the logic issues in the comments of the post. Specifically, Jeff uses some fallacious arguments to back up his claim. You’ll have to read the post for yourself in order to grasp what I’m reacting to here (too long to quote). In all fairness to Jeff, I don’t believe he actually intended to make any underhanded arguments. Still, the content of the message is what it is, and ought to be addressed. Here’s the meat of what I said (modified and slightly edited):

By attempting to use facts to make a case for the languages goodness or badness, you commit a naturalistic fallacy. PHP doesn’t suck because it allows you to write function names in three different ways. It does not suck because you consider it ungraceful. It does not suck because crappy coders use it. By the same token, it does not rock because its used by some of the biggest web properties.

Secondly and to a lesser extent, you’ve got a “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (after this, therefore because of this). Just because you used what some consider to be crappy languages in the past, does not validate what you are saying now about PHP. While I can understand and appreciate the effort to “commiserate,” I feel it is expressed under false pretenses.

The claims of suckiness tend to revolve around PHP’s hodgepodge nature; the quotes actually speak to this facet of the language more than the post itself. Summarily, because the language works around other web technologies, it lacks the elegance and cleanliness of some other languages, such as Visual Basic (his example). The effects of a lack of elegance are not discussed, but I estimate that Jeff and the quoted authors would predict some ultimate detriment to the developer or user, most likely in the form of maintainability and the prevention of software rot.

I freely admit that PHP operates as a bit of a mashup, making reading difficult at times. But the problem isn’t with PHP itself, but rather the platform for which it was developed. By its nature, writing for the web is to blend a hodgepodge of technologies. A typical web page these days is equal parts HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, all tied together with PHP. The grassroots nature of the internet compels the development of a language that grows with and as these new technologies emerge and develop. The PHP foundation recognizes this and simply rides the tide.

That being said, I see a larger issue at work here: by valuing internal code elegance over direct markup access, languages like Visual Basic and Ruby on Rails treat browser web output like some kind of necessary evil. These languages tuck the HTML and JavaScript away in built-in libraries, classes and functions, so the developer needn’t ever get their hands dirty. You can write entire websites without even looking at actual web markup.

Am I the only one who feels that this approach does disservice to developers and their users?

My opinion is 180 degrees in the other direction. I really appreciate the fact that PHP works in concert with these technologies, as opposed to superseding them. It allows me to leverage what each technology does best, independently, to achieve my target action in the best way possible. Leaving it up to my server-side code to build the majority of a web page for me sacrifices way more control than I care to give up.

Jeff thinks PHP looks bad and is difficult to maintain. Fair enough. To that, I say web development is a lot like farming: a good website crop yield still requires a guy to get his hands in the HTML dirt a little bit. Always has, always will.

Personally, I think PHP looks pretty damn cool, jumping in and out of HTML. Mix in some dynamically generated JavaScript, or really juice it up by building AJAX from PHP, and you have the makings of some “shit hot” code. I have no trouble reading it, but then again I build on the platform professionally, full-time, and write in an excessively clean fashion. I’m sure Jeff can say the same for VB, as can practically any other professional coder in the language of choice.

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