Rasmus Lerdorf

1968– · Danish programmer and creator of PHP

Topics: programming, software design

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

  — Rasmus Lerdorf

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

  — Rasmus Lerdorf

• PHP is rarely the bottleneck.

  — Rasmus Lerdorf

• I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems.

  — 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

• 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'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

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

  — 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

• 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