Rant about PHP
You know a technology is declining when the most basic questions about its most bizarre quirks are left completely unanswered for years.
#PHP is like that. Every day I have many of these questions. I look for them. No one asked them before, no one wrote about them before.
I'm baffled by the lack of curiosity and proactivity of its community.
I know it sounds like me piling up on people I don't know anything about, but I used to invest a lot of time programming in PHP. I went to conferences, I made some open source libraries for it, like a PHP kernel for Jupyter Notebooks, I even made a library to work with dataframes, tensors and matrices in PHP (although I lost this one because my laptop was stolen before I released... and I didn't had it in me to rewrite it again).
Then, the ones who I admired the most in that space, like Nikita Popov, started leaving it to work in more intellectually vibrant communities... and it shows.
I'm sure Nikita Popov would be much more gracious than me when talking about it. I can only speculate about his motivations, but at least I can tell you about mine: It was precisely about that same lack of curiosity and creativity that I mentioned before, it felt unbearably grey and sad.
Two years ago at #CSUN I learned about what became my favorite browser extension, BeeLine Reader. I've been a subscriber ever since.
It's easy to set up on desktop, but has been some struggle to get working on Android. But this week I discovered it works with Microsoft's Edge Canary mobile browser, which has experimental support for extensions. Instructions are here:
Anyone noticed how the characters in the Alien movies (the ones about Rippley) got progressively dumber as new chapters were released?
Don't remember it? Try to watch them in a row, it's astonishing. It's a good "exercise" because them being part of the same series makes it much easier to make comparisons.
I'd say that's what makes a big difference between the first one and the rest, not the plot in itself, but how idiotic are the characters after the first chapter.