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Hi, I'm Chris, a web developer and a founding member of Analog. I live and work in Brooklyn, NY.

CIO Magazine Trolls for Publicity

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 02:56:18 GMT
10 Comments
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All publicity is good publicity, right? I'm not so sure.

Last week, CIO Magazine published an article on the advantages and disadvantages of the PHP programming language that can only be described as a blunder. With a target audience of C-level technical executives, you might expect a fairly professional, in-depth treatment of the topic, but the title (You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!) quickly challenges such an assumption.

Not surprisingly, the quality of the article itself matches the quality of the title; technical imprecision is just one of the recurrent problems:

In fact, its full name is PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (one of those famous Unix recursive acronyms), which means that it understands hypertext (HTML) without any special API or modifications.

Yes, PHP is an acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, but HTML is an acronym for Hypertext Markup Language. Pedantry aside, understanding HTML is certainly not something a PHP subject matter expert typically mentions as a strength of the language. In fact, without a very distorted interpretation of what "understands HTML" means, it's not even true.

Strike one.

The comments provide more entertainment than the article, particularly the defensive posture of the author (Ken Hess) and editor (Esther Schindler). (The favicon is sure to make you chuckle as well.) Ken manages to lower the bar of professionalism even further with his remarks:

OMG, I am sure that was THE reason he got fired LOL. OMG. This is too entertaining! CIO should hire me as a full-time writer just to illicit more responses like that. I deserve my own TV show.

But, wait! There's more! Esther Schindler tries to defend the article again in a new post that continues the theme she began in the comments: defending the article by positioning those who disagree with it as fans who think PHP is the best solution for any problem:

I knew that these articles would attract attention from fans who believed their favorite language is sacrosanct and appropriate for every possible use.

When trying to defend your position against an audience that is particularly adept at logic, it's probably best to avoid using a logical fallacy as the basis of your attack. I've written about the Straw Man Argument before:

This is often described as putting words in someone's mouth, but more specifically, it's when you misrepresent someone else's position in order to make it seem as if your position is superior.

Strike two.

She does offer an interview question that a manager with no technical background can ask to vet the technical depth of a candidate. Simply ask the candidate to list the strengths and weaknesses of a particular technology:

It almost doesn't matter what the developer's answer is, as long as there's something on the "... and here's what I don't like about it" side. On the other hand, someone who insists that C# is great for everything immediately shows that's he's just a beginner, no matter what "senior" tag he puts on his résumé.

Pretty clever, right? All those who insist upon having someone "in the know" conduct the interview are just wasting resources.

There's just one small problem. Didn't a supposed PHP subject matter expert recently write an article about the strengths and weaknesses of PHP?

Strike three.

About This Post

CIO Magazine Trolls for Publicity was posted on Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 02:56:18 GMT.

10 Comments

1. JDempster said:

LOL Very funny, to add to the icon thing.

http://comments.cio.com/?=PHPE9568F...69-00AA001ACF42

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 11:02:27 GMT Link

2. essen said:

Wow I'm impressed you actually read this. Only thing I did when it showed up in my RSS is open, read the summary, then close.
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 11:46:24 GMT Link

3. Marcin said:

They did this with Perl too> http://www.cio.com/article/175450
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 17:00:12 GMT Link

4. Chris Shiflett said:

Hi Marcin,

Interesting read. Although it's not quite as bad as the article on PHP, it certainly includes some questionable advice, such as avoiding Perl on the Web. (It even recommends Rails over Perl when developing for the Web, which seems absurd considering the target audience.)

The author, James Turner, claims to be an editor on O'Reilly's ONLamp, although since he writes it as OnLAMP, I have my doubts. :-)
Fri, 08 Feb 2008 at 17:07:55 GMT Link

5. troels said:

In particular, PHP is not thread safe -- which means that multiple instances of the same routine may interact with each other, resulting in a crash on the Web server.

Where did that come from?
Sat, 09 Feb 2008 at 00:34:56 GMT Link

6. Wladimir said:

Well,

If somebody speaks on some thing, which cultural, regional and politics differences, would have to know where it is if putting. Exists millions of PHP programmers in the world. Many start to work with PHP and , after this, start to have access and work with other methods and technologies: DB2, Oracle, MSSQL, Mysql, Postgresql, Java, ASP, Xml and hundreds of others.

Everything this for the fact of the PHP to have a curve of fast learning, to be easy to use, we have libraries with millions of scripts, fóruns and jobs.

The best part is the cost, a PHP workshop/course not cost hundreds of dollars. I ask then, therefore I am tired of as many critical ones to the PHP, what they would be making these people if they were not programming?

Here in Brazil, in my city of São Paulo, we have thousands of 'motoboys' (men and women making deliveries with a motorcycle for documents and foods, but the services have a great variety).

I ask in what these people could be working if they had access to the technology and , for example, they become programmers or something it exactly type. Probably Java, ASP and PHP would be the choices. Adter this, C, Cobol, Mainframe and after this, exporting of softwares ( India its a great example).

PHP isn´t poor or is not made for poor persons, is balanced and very rich, therefore it obtains to add the knowledge and expectations of millions of people(IT). Its is possible for the simple fact of the PHP is open source and rich(again :D)

I ask then what it is better?

Better or worse... would be good somebody to define this before making any critical destructive to the PHP, ASP, Java and others.

ALL have advantages and disadvantages, but the final product quality will be given by who is behind the keyboard.

And ask to some of these critical contumacious if they had used, and loved, some service or product made with the same technology that they criticize in such a way. Hypocritical.

My apologies, I believe that I´m exceeded :D
Sat, 09 Feb 2008 at 11:22:50 GMT Link

7. Nick Shepherd said:

I just hope the author reads through all the comments and realizes what an ass he is for writing that article. It's arguments are unfounded and are uneducated. Almost all of the points he makes are problems that also exist in languages that he suggests using.

Think about it this way. What happens if you don't have the ability to "time out" a runaway script. Just because you hit stop on your browser it doesn't make the script's process stop. This is a safety measure to ensure you don't have 20 runaway scripts through a missed infinite loop or such (everyone still hits one sometimes especially when working through large data manipulation scripts [a missed incrementer is easily done when you have a list of 50 things in front of you that need to be done that day]).

I'm glad this article was pointed out, now something really needs to be done about taking it down because it's articles like that that contaminate the youth and inexperienced developers' opinions about languages.

And I'd like to think that my boss is smart enough to realize we know what we are doing, but I know out there there are business managers that are going to their IT department asking them why they are using PHP when this article says they should be using Java. I'm tired of people swinging their unaccounted for credibility around like this.

--steps off soapbox--
Mon, 11 Feb 2008 at 17:27:45 GMT Link

8. StrawDog said:

@Chris "The author, James Turner, claims to be an editor on O'Reilly's ONLamp, although since he writes it as OnLAMP, I have my doubts. :-)" You don't think there is a possibility that it was CIO that 'wrote' OnLAMP - see http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2978 for 'his' profile.

People in straw houses shouldn't ...
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 at 13:30:24 GMT Link

9. Chris Shiflett said:

Hi StrawDog,

Thanks for pointing that out. As I mentioned before, his article isn't nearly as bad as the one about PHP, but anyone who thinks Perl isn't well-suited for the Web shouldn't be writing articles about Perl.
Tue, 12 Feb 2008 at 16:02:41 GMT Link

10. Chris Shiflett said:

The author responded to this controversy and adopted a slightly more professional tone:

http://kenhess.wordpress.com/2008/0...o-write-what-2/

He offers the following excuse:

I had 24 hours to research, write, proof, and submit the article to the editor. It was not the optimal situation for either of us. Time was an unfortunate constraint.

I would never have agreed to these circumstances myself, but perhaps this type of work is his only source of income. It's still very difficult to have sympathy for someone who lets pride stand in the way of honesty:

I stand behind my article and every statement in it.

An author who stands behind false statements, months after making them, cannot blame time constraints.
Thu, 28 Aug 2008 at 17:45:59 GMT Link

Chris Shiflett wrote:: Glad it helped, Niall!; Posted in Git on Snow Leopard
Niall Kelly wrote:: Having tried other methods without success and looked through plenty of bloated documentation, th...; Posted in Git on Snow Leopard
liukang wrote:: I have problem with this example. In my php.ini magic_quotes_gpc is off so i'm using only addsla...; Posted in addslashes() Versus mysql_real_escape_string()
RyanTheGreat wrote:: Well, I'm not Chris, but I will do my best to address the questions raised in the comments by Ian...; Posted in Security Corner: Cross-Site Request Forgeries
Chris Shiflett wrote:: Thanks for the kind words, Simon. I'm glad you liked the tutorial. In case it's helpful, here'...; Posted in Webstock

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