I'm amazed he wasn't dead years ago. Seventy four is a good twenty years younger than I kind of assumed he would be. He was only forty when he did the design for Alien? I know he already had his artistic style famous before that, meaning he must have been a wee tacker when he started out. Amazing.
Also: vale. A talented artist with a distinctive voice.
That's pretty cool. I like how it would seem to support literate programming at a lower level than just extensive comments (which always seem to go stale) or long variable names (which often hinder comprehension more than they help it).
My major objections boil down to aesthetics and culture. The themes and layouts that shipped with Drupal 6 and below were all eye-bleedingly ugly, really obviously designed by developers with no eye for colour, layout, white space or typography. In those days, you could tell someone was looking at a Drupal website just from the sound of them rattling through the cutlery draw trying to find a spoon so they could gouge their own eyes out. This carried over to the ridiculously complex menu system and the barely usable administration methods, which made it actively unpleasant to use the system as developer OR user.
I gather D7 has improved on this a bit, though it's still nowhere near Wordpress in this regard.
The main trouble I had with the culture was that complexity was seen as something necessary for power; as in, you can't achieve a result with a simple system. You can only chop down a tree with a Swiss Army Knife; an axe is too simple. This carried over into the disastrous decision to throw out all the code, including third-party extensions, in every major version update, meaning that stuff you wrote and tricks you learned for version N would be almost completely useless for version N+1. I found that idea so totally beyond hopeless that I was forced to throw out what I had spent years laboriously learning and move over to Wordpress, which suffers from none of these problems.
Quite a good description of VMware et al, I thought. I frequently need to explain that technology to non-geeks; this is the description I'll be using from now on.
Why on Earth did you find it at all objectionable?
Amen, brother! Or sister. Or eukaryotic organisms. Whatever.
So what happened to Squiz? It was the godawful piece of shit that I criticised in the /. post that kinda-sorta lost me my job with AGIMO, so I wouldn't mind knowing how long it took for me to be proved right.
From using it on a daily basis, it's not even that great at uni websites. The killer failing as far as I'm concerned is the menu system - compared with WordPress or Drupal or any other content management system, it makes adding pages to menus such a chore...
sniuff is right, Drupal is all PHP, through and through.
As for Wordpress's alleged speed problems, I haven't had any trouble. The speed of development for WP is way ahead of that for Drupal, in my experience at least, to the point where I just refuse to work on Drupal installations and convert them over to WP as a first step.
I worked for a mob that only used Drupal. I'm one of those weirdos that actually likes modern PHP, but I didn't last long there. In my opinion nearly anything else is preferable to clicking through that damned GUI to get it to do what I want without hacking the core or messing with those damned hooks. I mean, check our changes into git? Why would we want to do that? :<
There's a new version of it now, which is an option when you go to maps.google.com. I tried it and gave up because it doesn't seem to work on Tasmanian ADSL - sits and spins, never loads, presumably because the new state government got into the state's internet infrastructure and shot one of the hamsters.
I used to work for AGIMO, and I personally implemented the first version of australia.gov.au. Funny story: I got caught posting something on Slashdot that they interpreted as critical of their decision making (spoiler: it was, because their decision making was hideous), so they decided not to renew my contract. They still had me doing the australia.gov.au project though. I took what was, basically, a Photoshop document produced by some mob up in Brisbane, and turned it into something usable, accessible and extensible, with a strong focus on accessibility for visually impaired and disabled users and on old or non-desktop browsers. I had to fight every step of the way to fix the original Photoshop design to make it work, but I was vindicated when the site won awards... which were given to the mob in Brisbane.
Meanwhile, they had a grand opening at Parliament House to which all the media were invited -- and I was very pointedly not invited, presumably because they were worried I'd say rude things about them (spoiler: I would have). Then the leader of the National Party chose that morning to resign, and nobody from the media came to the launch party because they were busy over the other side of the House interviewing him. So I felt a certain degree of whatever that German word is for "serves you right, you bastards".
Meanwhile, australia.gov.au had a bunch of redesigns and is even better now, so the three guys they brought in to replace me obviously did good work...
The Australian government is particularly stupid at the moment. I leave as an exercise for the reader the question of whether this is example or counter-example of that.
We have a surprisingly nice country, considering our governance over the years. I'm a bit worried 'bout the current mob, though, they seem determined to wreck things even more than previous governments. I think I preferred the previous mob: stabbing themselves in the back distracted them from stuffing things up!
AGIMO is funny. It used to be part of the Department of Communications, then it got slurped up by Finance. The people in charge were career public servants, totally interchangeable with no real idea of what the org was doing. What they basically did was develop policy according to whatever the Minister said in Question Time, which frequently led to whole new projects being invented in a rush on a Thursday afternoon and made into unassailable policy by Monday. So in a sense, decision were being made by MPs. Though you're right, this doesn't seem to be suffering from the same problem.
Your comment would have been amusingly surreal if there were no closing tags for the <uint32_t> stuff in the article. I'm almost disappointed that there were. I wonder who was responsible for that particular bug in the Facebook formatting code.
Also: vale. A talented artist with a distinctive voice.