PHP Addiction
Is it my imagination or is Marco the king of writing blog posts that are quick reactions to whatever is trending on HN?<p>The message you should get from this post is that familiarity with one's tools easily trumps any aesthetic flaws (consistency in parameter ordering, naming conventions, etc are really nothing more than aesthetic flaws and not "deep" [1] as the author suggests. After all, human language is inconsistent. After awhile you just get used to it and don't think about it anymore. Programming languages are no different.<p>I agree with Marco that it will take "years to master" whatever he chooses next. I always scratch my head at these "I learnt Python in a day" claims you often see around here. No, you didn't learn Python in a day. You learnt the syntax for a for loop in a day. Idiomatic Python takes much longer.<p>I don't agree that choice is the reason people don't use Linux on the desktop. Desktop Linux is the reason people don't use Linux on the desktop. I'm sorry but it's truly awful and probably won't ever get better. In the absence of product direction you have us geeks making everything configurable because, you never know, you may want to write your own window manager (and knowing us geeks, no two will agree on what's right) so you have no consistency, no grand UI/UX design and it's just terrible.<p>I use Linux/Ubuntu at work basically because I have to. There are advantages on having your dev environment mirror your production environment and Linux (over OSX) does actually have a package system (it's a messy hack on OSX) but I certainly don't like it.<p>The only computers I use that I truly enjoy using are my iPad and my Macbook Air.<p>Fear of the wrong choice isn't I believe what motivates most people. Fear of looking like an idiot? Sure. But that's different and will probably be the case with anything new.<p>People don't tend to weight up two or more options, decide which is best and go with it. They tend to use the first thing they come across until its flaws (perceived or actual) outweigh the "cost" of transition and appearing like an idiot for awhile.<p>[1]: <a href="http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/" rel="nofollow">http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...</a>