Hammerprinciple.com is a really fascinating site: high-dimensional representations of people's opinions and use of various things:

• programming languages
• databases
• browsers
• version control systems

and on a slightly different note:

• martial arts
• gin

(Although gin can be nasty. But that depends on several factors, and in any case gin quality is probably less important than suitability for a particular mixed drink...actually I can't verify either of the two things I just said, but hammerprinciple.com knows.)

For this post, though, let's look a what people had to say about PHP -- a complex language to characterize, to be sure, and polarizing, although perhaps only due to its huge success.

High-dimensional representations capture real opinions much more accurately (real things aren't bundles of few-dimensional properties), but quickly become unwieldy. The key is finding the right balance between the fine-grainedness offered by a higher number of dimensions, on the one hand, and the quantitative tractability offered by fewer dimensions, on the other.

The surveys on hammerprinciple.com found this balance rather well, I think, and displays some pretty cool results -- out of a sample size over 5700, at the moment, which I suppose is meaningfully large (for a websurvey).

One result is the title of this post: many developers would use PHP for a web project, but would be embarassed to admit that they know the language at all. (Ha, that's almost like being human.)

Since the results are constantly changing, here's a snapshot as of right now:

I like the #1 'Ranked Low' item. (No I don't, PHP did improve my ability as a programmer!)

Drill down for more PHP results, or check out the sweet hammerprinciple homepage for more interesting high-dimensional community analysis.