A commenter on my last article jokes:

I thought : “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” was Robbie Wiliams stuff!

I should issue a couple of corrections to improper attributions in that article.

The quote it is only attributed to Ghandhi. Odds are that Ghandi was paraphrasing someone else, as Wikiquote corrects me:

A close variant of the quotation first appears in a 1914 US trade union address by Nicholas Klein:
“And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you. And that, is what is going to happen to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America.”

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Bringing a ball of nails to a gunfight

Furthermore, Paul Jones notes that I did not attribute this quote:

A Java person says, “Look at it this way, Java is like a knife. A knife can do many things. A good one is essential for cooking; it can cut open packages, cut a cord, and it really comes in handy in a fist fight. Java can do a lot of things and do them very well.”

A PHP person, if they had to fight, would rather have something that is designed to solve that one problem, and solve it well.

A PHP person says, “That knife is nice, but I’d rather have a gun.”

I thought that was a clever turn on a previous joke of mine (via The Untouchables).

A friend of mine, however, beat me to this idea:

Yes, let me introduce you to the professional PHP programmer. You see, PHP is like a handgun. On its own, it is simply an inanimate tool that has no moral leaning. In the hands of a responsible citizen, it can be used to the benefit of society. But in the hands of someone who is untrained or mentally unstable, it can be used to commit horrible atrocities.

(This is especially ironic since Microsoft showcased us at PDC last month.)

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Ah well, at least I still have the “PHP is a ball of nails” thing. 🙂

As I’m sure I’m the first to say: 😉

Everybody steals from everybody, that’s PHP.

And while the whole of this article may have been a big tangent, the above, at least, was germane to that discussion. 😀