

PHP Founder Rasmus Lerdorf Joins Group Payments Startup WePay (YC S09) - trefn
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/27/php-founder-rasmus-lerdorf-joins-group-payments-startup-wepay/

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strlen
Congratulations on the hire. Even though I dislike PHP and avoid primarily-PHP
projects (which excludes me from something like 75% of all start-ups, but was
fine at Yahoo where many teams used Java/C++/Perl for backend/middleware
work), I can only say good things about his contributions at Yahoo which went
beyond PHP work e.g., educating engineers on web security.

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rokhayakebe
Funny thing. When you google your username the first result is the php
function.

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mahmud
strlen(3) first appeared in Reaserch Unix v7, circa January 1979:

[http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-1...](http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub///mirrors/minnie.tuhs.org/PDP-11/Trees/V7/usr/src/libc/gen/strlen.c)

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iamelgringo
I've been hanging out with the WePay guys since shortly after they moved to
Silicon Valley. They are really great guys. I also happened to meet Rasmus at
WePay's launch party, and he impressed the socks off me with how laid back and
unassuming he was. We talked for about half an hour about the history of PHP.
I learned a bunch and wanted to hang out with the guy a lot more.

I've been using WePay to manage the payment of sponsorships at the
<http://HackersandFounders.com> meetups, and I'm also using it to transfer
money between members of my family.

I have no skin in their game aside from really liking the guys. If you're
interested in working for a great startup that has amazing potential, you
should really send WePay your resume.

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breck
Very cool. Do you guys do most of your backend logic in PHP as well, or just
the website?

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billclerico
when we first started, basically the entire application was php. over time we
have introduced other various languages in different places

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vijayr
which ones? and at what layers?

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leftnode
Congrats to both! I think it's important to realize while there are a lot of
valid criticisms with PHP (likewise with other popular languages), there are
still a great many intelligent developers and programmers in the PHP
community. Once you wade through a lot of the cruft (and there's a lot of it),
you'll hear from some really intelligent people who use PHP.

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rythie
I've seen Rasmus speak twice and talked to him once. He certainly is very
interested in APIs. It seems a theme of his to hack a mashup together with an
API that exposes information that wasn't previously available.

I would guess that this post is more about his passion for APIs than it is
about PHP.

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whalesalad
If anyone's ever used PHP, this sounds like the _worst_ hire ever. I bet he's
a smart guy, but you can gain some insight on his attitude towards development
here -- <http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/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."

~~~
RyanMcGreal
He sounds like one of the most valuable kinds of programmer: humble about his
own abilities and more interested in solving problems than being precious
about the elegance of his code. PHP itself hews to this same pragmatic
philosophy, and it's the reason PHP powers a huge swath of the internet.

Personally, I find coding PHP is like chewing on tinfoil. Nevertheless, it has
allowed countless developers to _solve problems quickly_ without having to
learn a bunch of boilerplate or internalize elaborate data models.

~~~
jey
There's a huge difference between actual pragmatism and shooting yourself in
the foot in the name of pragmatism.

No, you shouldn't build your program out of some overengineered
metahyperpolymorphic Proton and Electron base classes in the name of
"elegance". But the problem with PHP is that it goes completely to the other
extreme: it has no internal consistency and little foresight. Simplicity is a
great desideratum, but it shouldn't come at the expense of sense.

~~~
netcan
In the context of a startup hire, think about it this way:

He has created something very popular and widely used for an extremely
difficult to please market with a huge amount of competition, some of it from
scary places. The domain is a hard one.

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hussong
Awesome hire, congrats, Bill and Rich! Looking forward to your API.

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trefn
congrats guys, that's huge. i hope you see a large influx of resumes.

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jfong
Nice find!

