Rasmus Lerdorf quotes

Rasmus Lerdorf is a Danish-Canadian programmer, best known as the creator of the PHP scripting language. His work has had a profound impact on web development, powering countless dynamic websites worldwide. He continues to contribute to open source software and the technology community. Here are 23 of his quotes:

I've never thought of PHP as more than a simple tool to solve problems. (Rasmus Lerdorf)

For all the folks getting excited about my quotes. Here is another - Yes, I am a terrible coder, but I am probably still better than you :)

Rasmus Lerdorf

Ugly problems often require ugly solutions. Solving an ugly problem in a pure manner is bloody hard.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intent to write a programming language [...] I have absolutely no idea how to write a programming language, I just kept adding the next logical step on the way.

Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP is rarely the bottleneck.

Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?

Rasmus Lerdorf

I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "Yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart Apache every 10 requests.

Rasmus Lerdorf

There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming.

Rasmus Lerdorf

We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. (Rasmus Lerdorf)

I do care about memory leaks but I still don't find programming enjoyable.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen()

Rasmus Lerdorf

If eval() is the answer, you're almost certainly asking the wrong question.

Rasmus Lerdorf

When the world becomes standard, I will start caring about standards.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I did not develop the PHP we know today. Dozens, if not hundreds of people, developed PHP. I was simply the first developer.

Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP is just a hammer. Nobody has ever gotten rich making hammers.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers.

Rasmus Lerdorf

I'm OK with procedural code, and the web is a top-down type of problem. It makes sense to me that you have HTML, you spit out a bunch of HTML, then you call a function to do something and then call another function.

Rasmus Lerdorf

This is your silly web browser doing that. The file is correctly named.

Rasmus Lerdorf

If you want to build an open source project, you can't let your ego stand in the way. You can't rewrite everybody's patches, you can't second-guess everybody, and you have to give people equal control. (Rasmus Lerdorf)

I've never used Sybase in my life. How would I make an intelligent decision about this versus that with a Sybase extension?

Rasmus Lerdorf

PHP 8 is significantly better because it contains a lot less of my code.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf

Rasmus Lerdorf - Image

Photo: William Stadtwald Demchick, CC BY-SA 4.0

Occupation: Danish Programmer
Born: November 22, 1968
Quotes count: 23
Wikipedia: Rasmus Lerdorf

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