grumpycanuck

Nice American-centric view there. Up here in Canada we can use 'debit' to pay using our bank account with a separate card from our credit cards.

I have a book I published using Leanpub and I set the minimum to be $10. Some people pay the minimum. Some people pay the suggested price of $15. Some have even been as generous as to pay MORE than the suggested price.

If I ever decide to give away my book for free for a limited time, I would not feel bad about people giving me $0 when they could give me whatever they want.

I am in agreement with Raganwald in that I just want people to read it and find it helpful.

I suggest you do some research about the author of the MicroPHP manifesto before throwing snark out there like that.

Ed is a personal friend (and we do a podcast together) with many, MANY years of experience building applications using PHP. While I don't agree with him on some points in there, he does deserve to not be shit on by people who can't be bothered to do 30 seconds of research about the author.

Just took a look, that is an awesome paper.

My experience is that it is a very rare and enlightened management team that allows developers to go back and clean up the technical debt that was created during the mad dash to get your application out the door.

Most of the time you are stuck with technical debt because there is no room in your timeline to go back and fix stuff that you know is broken.

YMMV, but as the blog post author I'm keenly aware of this situation.

Author here:

With the understanding that I do most of my work in the most-bullied, down-trodden programming language here on Hacker News (PHP) I think that your choice of language, framework and persistence layer leads to technical debt or friction as raganwald commented above.

Like I said before, I view infrastructure debt as the cost of consistency in your environments and the cost of moving your code from one environment to another. Very rarely is the choice of language going to be a problem, unless you are trying to use a language in a way it's not intended to be uses (to throw out a completely random idea, like trying to use PHP as a functional language ).

Frameworks are a sore point for people, but mainly because they choose to fight them instead of trying to do everything the framework's way. Picking the wrong framework is a technical debt situation, not a problem of moving code from dev to production.

Persistence layer stuff is also a technical debt / friction issue. Chances are that you could use that particular data store without the persistence layer you chose. For example, I struggled to learn Doctrine1/2 but once I learned how DQL worked it became a lot easier to break out of the object-only contraints and create custom queries.

Hope that makes sense and answers your question.

(Blog post author here)

Upon reflection your use of the term "friction" is a good one. Although I tend to look at "debt" as something you pay back as quickly as possible but sometimes you can only pay it back in installments.

I guess you could say having too much infrastructure friction eventually leads to one humungous infrastructure bonfire. :)

(I'm the blog post author)

I would place database design debt firmly in the technical debt side of the ledger (as it were). To me, infrastructure debt deals more with consistency across environments and consistency in moving code from one environment to another.

I also agree with you that database design debt is very expensive and, as you pointed out, leads to paralysis over fixing problems with an established application.

Blog post author here. Yeah, I figured it has been around a lot longer than 20 years but I thought the 20 year thing would get the point across.

I'm a long-time PHP user (since 1998) but I never really peered inside the discussions of the internals of PHP. Now that I'm more connected to others in the PHP world, what you see inside the mailing list for PHP internals is what I would label as obstructionism and an attitude that seems to imply that if you cannot code the requested changes yourself, don't even bother asking.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way are the only three choices available to any language.

Why not do it through a PEAR channel instead of basically creating your own version of it?