Guy comes out of closet on Facebook to friends who are entirely too geeky to care.

March 28, 2012 11:02 AM

Guy comes out of closet on Facebook to friends who are entirely too geeky to care.

"when I was younger I had some... experimentation? with PHP"

posted by Argyle (70 comments total)

The internet, ladies and gentlemen.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:09 AM on March 28, 2012 [6 favorites]

We don't have a problem with homosexuality, but bland stylesheets are a different matter entirely.
posted by Afroblanco at 11:09 AM on March 28, 2012 [32 favorites]

I really hope that this becomes the norm for coming out.

Not a tear down of the style in which it was done, but a "oh that's nice, hey look something shiny."

Looking forward to the day when it's a non-event other than people just saying "still love ya."
posted by sourbrew at 11:10 AM on March 28, 2012 [5 favorites]

Is it asking too much to do it with style?
posted by tommasz at 11:10 AM on March 28, 2012

Good for him and all...nice funny little twist and all...

but... should I be a bit frightened/concerned/worried/freaked the hell out that a single FaceBook post and the resulting comments is a new standard for Metafilter?
posted by HuronBob at 11:15 AM on March 28, 2012 [11 favorites]

What's the damage against php?
posted by cjorgensen at 11:15 AM on March 28, 2012

So am I twelve or do all the photo/name redactions make it looks like a rainbow assortment of dicks?
posted by griphus at 11:21 AM on March 28, 2012 [17 favorites]

Cjorgensen, are you being serious?

It starts with the random capitalizantion and counter intuitive names of built in methods, it ends with the only large PHP based sites having had to rewrite parts of PHP in C in order to be able to scale.
posted by Ayn Rand and God at 11:21 AM on March 28, 2012 [7 favorites]

What's the damage against php?

Depends on your weapon, really, but I'd say roll 2d6 and find out.
posted by komara at 11:22 AM on March 28, 2012 [41 favorites]

php
posted by East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 at 11:24 AM on March 28, 2012 [13 favorites]

Hey now, you have to respect a guy for not wanting to gay up his coming out announcement.
posted by bonehead at 11:25 AM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

I disagree HuronBob, that's the hardest I have laughed in some time, so I think it qualifies as best of the web. Of course now I have to try to explain to mrs holdkris99 why I am over here chuckling in the passenger seat.
posted by holdkris99 at 11:26 AM on March 28, 2012

Metafilter: a rainbow assortment of dicks?
posted by herbplarfegan at 11:28 AM on March 28, 2012 [8 favorites]

There's a joke in here somewhere about white backgrounds being professional...
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 11:30 AM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

But, but, gay nerds don't exist!*

*Is what my nerdy gay friend tells me.
posted by asnider at 11:30 AM on March 28, 2012

"So am I twelve or do all the photo/name redactions make it looks like a rainbow assortment of dicks?"

You may be twelve, or have the mind of a twelve year-old, I don't know. I don't know you very well. However, the redactions do, indeed, resemble said rainbow.

Which, seems pretty appropriate for the content of the post. Don't you think?
posted by oddman at 11:30 AM on March 28, 2012

Wow, did I just type that out loud? Geez. I mortify myself.
posted by oddman at 11:31 AM on March 28, 2012

In my defense I was thinking that the rainbow part was the appropriate element.

I'll shut up now.
posted by oddman at 11:32 AM on March 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

So am I twelve or do all the photo/name redactions make it looks like a rainbow assortment of dicks?

Heh, I was thinking the exact same thing. Pretty sure my SO would say I'm twelve.
posted by Doleful Creature at 11:33 AM on March 28, 2012

but... should I be a bit frightened/concerned/worried/freaked the hell out that a single FaceBook post and the resulting comments is a new standard for Metafilter?

I feel like we're past the point where you're really plausibly still unclear on the "take metacommentary to metatalk" thing, man. If you want to talk about it, talk about it there. Otherwise just flag it and move on.
posted by cortex at 11:36 AM on March 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

I loved this. My favorite comment: "Quiet [name], this doesn't concern you. We're working on a project."
posted by maudlin at 11:37 AM on March 28, 2012 [28 favorites]

That reads like a Metafilter thread, with the chatty side conversations that ignore the point of the post and calling for meetups and all.
posted by ThatCanadianGirl at 11:37 AM on March 28, 2012

Pretty sure my SO would say I'm twelve.

*phones the police*
posted by shakespeherian at 11:40 AM on March 28, 2012 [15 favorites]

the only large PHP based sites having had to rewrite parts of PHP in C in order to be able to scale.

PHP is already written in C, like most unixy software. You're probably thinking of what Facebook did, which was, hilariously, to write a PHP to C++ compiler.
posted by whir at 11:43 AM on March 28, 2012 [3 favorites]

php

The only gotcha there (and it is unfortunately pretty easy to run into that gotcha) is "php" == 0. Everything else makes sense for a weakly typed language.
posted by kmz at 11:46 AM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

You are right that is hilarious.
posted by tigrefacile at 11:48 AM on March 28, 2012

Oh, that is charming. And hilarious.
posted by miss tea at 11:52 AM on March 28, 2012

My favourite comment (and it all reminds me of any one of those MeTa threads)

"Good work, [redacted] it takes a lot of guts to post things on a plain HTML page these days. You're an inspiration to us all :) Oh, and well done on the coming out well. It's good to see people accepting things like this. I think we can all agree that gay scientists had it rough in the past."
posted by infini at 12:00 PM on March 28, 2012

Everything else makes sense for a weakly typed language.

Disagree.

In most dynamically-typed languages, objects need to be of (roughly) the same type before they can be equal. "1" is a string while 1 is a number. 1 should not equal "1". I'll give a pass for 1 == 1.0 because they're close enough.
posted by suetanvil at 12:00 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Sorry, but I just need to point out that A Rainbow of Dicks would be a fabulous name for a Game of Thrones slashfic.
posted by nathancaswell at 12:13 PM on March 28, 2012 [29 favorites]

I didn't even really bother *telling* my Facebook friends. I just figured anybody who didn't already know would figure it out with the new-girlfriend schmoopiness and anybody who minded could go to hell. The trouble with this business of coming out and social networks is that eventually I have to tell my mother. Who is then likely to think I have no more reason not to add her on Facebook. But... to be honest, I just really, really don't want to add my mother on Facebook.
posted by gracedissolved at 12:24 PM on March 28, 2012 [3 favorites]

This Ain't Reading Rainbow XXX
posted by griphus at 12:26 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

PHP is great. Wikipedia and Facebook run it. It's got lots of functions and some quirks, but that only really offends purists - it's never a practical problem. It's incredibly powerful and the errors are clear and it's well documented and useful and there's tons of examples for anything you could want to do with it.

People get snobby because it's so easy to use, in fact, but that says more about them than the language.

What are we comparing to, anyway - ASP? Uh, heh.
posted by iotic at 12:30 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

"1" is a string while 1 is a number. 1 should not equal "1"

Javascript, Perl, DB2 for iSeries, and MySQL all disagree. Ruby and Python do it your way. I'm not saying that that kind of weak typing should be universal, but it's not that omgterribad either if you know what to expect.
posted by kmz at 12:30 PM on March 28, 2012

I see that this guy's friends are not the only ones who are entirely too geeky to care.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 12:38 PM on March 28, 2012 [14 favorites]

People get snobby because it's so easy to use, in fact, but that says more about them than the language.

PHP is not easy to use; PHP is only easy to approach. People who understand programming languages get snobby about PHP because it is poorly designed, which makes it hard to understand. Its nomenclature is inconsistent, its parameter ordering is inconsistent, its semantics are complex and inconsistent, and its APIs confuse you by making it too easy to do things you probably shouldn't do. These are not characteristics which are immediately visible, or omissions you encounter once and solve once, but continuous low-grade irritations which make life just a bit harder than it needs to be. If you have never done any serious coding before, you won't notice what you're missing; but you'll waste time and encounter more bugs than you might have with a better-designed language.
posted by Mars Saxman at 12:47 PM on March 28, 2012 [7 favorites]

I think the color-coding for each different dick speaker is clever and it made me think of each commenter as "Mr. Pink", "Mr. Blue", etc. (yeah, all males).

As for the straight, Jewish, male 12-year-olds amongst us, did you not click on "How to instantly become a superstar to 12-year-olds who love boobs" in the sidebar?

You didn't? Oh.
posted by mistersquid at 12:49 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

Is it a given that all humor of this type will have horrific redacting? EVEN MS PAINT HAS RECTANGLES PEOPLE!! YOU WILL FIND THEM EASIER TO USE.
posted by Ogre Lawless at 12:53 PM on March 28, 2012 [6 favorites]

iotic: "It's incredibly powerful and the errors are clear"

Only if you're using xdebug. PHP does a pretty good job, but honestly, there are other languages that throw more useful errors.

Apple put a ton of effort into making Clang/LLVM produce better error messages than gcc, and it really shows.
posted by schmod at 12:54 PM on March 28, 2012

whir: I know PHP is in C. What I meant is that I know people who get so frustrated with PHP that they rewrite pieces of it, and it is done in C. It is like getting a single speed bicycle with training wheels because it is oh so easy to use, even for beginners, and then having to learn quantum mechanics to make it go over 10mph.
posted by Ayn Rand and God at 1:00 PM on March 28, 2012

I used to be a big nay-sayer about PHP. I had been doing Perl development for years, and its inconsistent subroutine naming was one of the big hurdles for me. Then I had to learn it for work, and I designed something OO. Dear god did it get that part right (i.e. very C++-like). Fuck you, Perl 5, and your fucking blessed hashrefs and "honor system" access control. What the eff.

Oh, yeah, the link. I'd like to think that's how most of my friends would react to a coming out post, too.
posted by Plutor at 1:03 PM on March 28, 2012

Plutor, sure, you can use a butter knife to drive in a nail (eventually), but a hammer will work better.
posted by MikeKD at 1:07 PM on March 28, 2012

I've done plenty of coding in C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl and Ruby. I like PHPfor what it does. It works well. Yeah the ordering of the parameters is occasionally skewy, but generally it works well and is easy to debug.

Compare JavaScript, where the string concatenation operator is +, types are loose, and error messages are often unclear. I once spent about an hour trying to debug something and traced it to the fact that I'd rearranged var1 + var2 > 0 to var1 > -var2 (or similar). Turned out var1 was being interpreted as a string. Generally PHP is friendlier, and has better choices for e.g. the concatenation operator.

Sure C is better for fast stuff, it's beautiful. But PHP is useful for a good range of stuff from server scripting and hacking stuff together to play with, to big projects with several devs. I would like to learn python sometime, as it's clearly good too. But PHP, JavaScript and C variants cover most bases for me.
posted by iotic at 1:07 PM on March 28, 2012

Sorry, but I just need to point out that A Rainbow of Dicks would be a fabulous name for a Game of Thrones slashfic.

Sorry, but I just need to point out that the Guided by Voices song "Game of Pricks" syncs up startlingly well with the Game of Thrones title sequence.
posted by Iridic at 1:19 PM on March 28, 2012

A friend came out to me a couple of years ago, built it up like there was going to be something huge and traumatic and potentially damaging. After she told me, I was like "I thought you were going to tell me you were moving. This, I can handle."
posted by MrMoonPie at 1:21 PM on March 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

iotic: Some of the complaints about PHP are certainly just a matter of taste, but there are a lot of legitimate problems with the language and its interpreter, maybe more than with any other widely used environment out there. For instance, phpsadness.com and phpwtf.org list a few things that are, objectively, problems; of course they aren’t exhaustive. The interpreter looks pretty bad from a software engineering point of view, too: When the development branch last built automatically (right now it doesn’t), 99 of its unit tests failed. Sadly, the situation doesn’t really look better for the current stable version. Also, there is a need for this project, which is simply depressing.

Hell, they even manage to break the damn parser every once in a while. There have been inexplicably stupid choices like not dealing with perfectly reasonable code such as f()[0] for ages, and in certain (recent!) versions, 0x00+2 would evaluate to 4!

And I could go on. Seriously, PHP is ridiculous.
posted by wachhundfisch at 1:22 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

"when I was younger I had some... experimentation? with PHP"

Totally misread that. I was like..yeah...so did James Brown.
posted by spicynuts at 1:31 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Well it's a ridiculous language that powers most of the web. Out here in the real world, there aren't many problems with it.
posted by iotic at 1:46 PM on March 28, 2012

But, but, gay nerds don't exist!*


Then who is is that Todd Packer keeps calling for?
posted by Senor Cardgage at 1:48 PM on March 28, 2012

Sorry, but I just need to point out that A Rainbow of Dicks would be a fabulous name for a Game of Thrones slashfic.

I was just thinking that A Rainbow of Dicks would be a great collective noun, like gaggle of geese, school of fish, etc.
posted by FunGus at 1:55 PM on March 28, 2012 [3 favorites]

Or is "A Rainbow of Dicks" the lost sequel to "A Confederacy of Dunces?"
posted by modernserf at 1:57 PM on March 28, 2012

Gay nerds do too exist, they just have no luck getting laid by their own sex rather than the opposite.
posted by jonmc at 2:09 PM on March 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

Gay nerds certainly do exist. However, we're rare enough we tend to never travel in packs of more than two or three simultaneously.

Also, saying things like "How about Robert Duncan McNeill in Voyager. I'd like to explore his Jefferies tube." tends to dissuade further contact from the rest of our gay cohorts.
posted by conradjones at 2:23 PM on March 28, 2012 [6 favorites]

As for the straight, Jewish, male 12-year-olds amongst us, did you not click on "How to instantly become a superstar to 12-year-olds who love boobs" in the sidebar?

I didn't even know it was about bar mitzvahs and such until after I clicked. But, yeah, I clicked. And, yeah, my 12-year-old self could related. Although, I'm pretty sure I never thought that the vagina was located "somewhere on the stomach."

Gay nerds certainly do exist. However, we're rare enough we tend to never travel in packs of more than two or three simultaneously.

I know. I just remember a friend of mine telling me that people frequently say things like: "But you're a nerd, you can't be gay" (and vice versa) to him. It's like one stereotype cancels out the other, or something.

Also, saying things like "How about Robert Duncan McNeill in Voyager. I'd like to explore his Jefferies tube." tends to dissuade further contact from the rest of our gay cohorts.

If I was gay, that's exactly the kind of thing that would make me look at you with a look of shame...right before I started laughing and told my own innuendo-laden Star Trek joke.
posted by asnider at 2:32 PM on March 28, 2012

I know. I just remember a friend of mine telling me that people frequently say things like: "But you're a nerd, you can't be gay" (and vice versa) to him. It's like one stereotype cancels out the other, or something.

Indeed. It appears as if there's some unwritten rule of the cosmos that gay nerds are breaking. Any time I talk to someone about Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars, MTG, etc, someone winds up acting surprised when I also mention how attractive Chris Hemsworth is in Thor.
posted by conradjones at 2:37 PM on March 28, 2012

I don't know how much of the hilarious sidebarring is intentional riffing on the hilarious sidebarring that brought us here in the first place, but it's hilarity remains glorious across either possibility.
posted by ~ at 2:38 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Oh. No. Bad itsing.
posted by ~ at 2:39 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Also, saying things like "How about Robert Duncan McNeill in Voyager. I'd like to explore his Jefferies tube." tends to dissuade further contact from the rest of our gay cohorts.

Something something Tom, Harry and dick something
posted by cortex at 2:45 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Also, saying things like "How about Robert Duncan McNeill in Voyager. I'd like to explore his Jefferies tube." tends to dissuade further contact from the rest of our gay cohorts.

Something something Tom, Harry and dick something

"So, let's say Tom, Harry, and Tuvok get trapped on the Delta Flyer and Tuvok goes into the Pon Far..." is not exactly how you want your pornos to start, gay or otherwise.
posted by conradjones at 2:50 PM on March 28, 2012

And yet you can find kiloquads of the stuff if you go looking on the right subspace channels.
posted by cortex at 2:53 PM on March 28, 2012

This is approximately what the post-heteronormative future will look like. Well, minus the "I have to tell you something, guys" angst. But yeah, good for everyone involved. In a generation or two, no one will see what the big deal is.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:17 PM on March 28, 2012

I love how this thread became more about PHP that the FPP itself.
posted by slogger at 6:45 PM on March 28, 2012

Well it's a ridiculous language that powers most of the web. Out here in the real world, there aren't many problems with it.

Depends on what you mean by "most of the web." It's popular with bloggers and personal homepages and the like, but many (most?) large-scale web apps are running Java or .NET back ends, due to the security and scalability requirements that those companies have. Many smaller web apps and startups and the like are written using Python or Ruby.
posted by sonic meat machine at 8:12 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

This page describes the best awful error message of all time. It's thrown by GCC.
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 8:27 PM on March 28, 2012

I've long said that I'd be completely supportive if my son or daughter told me they were gay.

However, god help them if they don't use vim.
posted by heathkit at 10:29 PM on March 28, 2012 [5 favorites]

god help them if they don't use vim.

Yeah no child of mine is gonna be one of those flamboyant elispers.
posted by I've a Horse Outside at 10:38 PM on March 28, 2012

conradjones: someone winds up acting surprised when I also mention how attractive Chris Hemsworth is in Thor

OMG yes. I would go a step beyond attractive to licking the screen when he went about shirtless. My friends, gods bless 'em, were not at all surprised. The rest of the moviegoers were not so forgiving.
posted by malthusan at 11:09 PM on March 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

"Have you told your parents you don't use style sheets? That's the hardest part."

Oh, humanity. I just can't quit you.
posted by oneironaut at 6:37 AM on March 29, 2012 [3 favorites]

Well, the internet just completed me. Thanks. I could meet Optimus Prime in person today and it wouldn't top this link.
posted by scunning at 7:55 AM on March 29, 2012

My favorite part about that was that the resulting MeFi thread turned into an argument on the merits of PHP. THAT is awesome.
posted by Kimberly at 9:17 AM on March 29, 2012 [1 favorite]