Ryan Tomayko

In praise of git’s index —

Aristotle explains how he uses git’s index and how it makes git unique among VCSs. I’ve raved about git’s index before in The Thing About Git. It’s great.

How to usurp PHP’s place: an outline —

Aristotle Pagaltzis on eating PHP’s lunch: “It will have to be more than just a programming language, because PHP itself is really more than a programming language. It includes a crude web framework (an invocation model reminiscent of CGI, with extensions) plus a crude deployment solution (just make all the libraries part of the language and let the sysadmin worry about it – who in turn often defers to his operating system vendor). This is PHP’s way of taking the worse-is-better philosophy to dazzling new depths …”

I was having this conversation at work the other day and came away with the conclusion that even if something were to reach feature / ease of use parity with PHP today, it would be many years before it actually surpassed the language in real deployments. PHP is everywhere.

Aristotle Pagaltzis takes both sides of the XML 2.0 debate -- my feelings exactly —

“There are cases where you really do want that. There are cases when you don’t. There are cases where it’s half this, half that; cases, say, where you only want charset sniffing. There are cases where you want a pony. Not every document has the same g