Love Quote by Rasmus Lerdorf

There is a kind of productive heresy in Lerdorf admitting he "hates programming" while loving "solving problems". In a culture that treats coding as identity and craft-as-religion, he’s stripping the romance out of it: programming isn’t the point, it’s the handle you grab when something needs fixing. The line works because it reverses what tech status usually rewards. Instead of fetishizing elegance, languages, or "clean" abstractions, it puts the messy, often tedious reality of software back on the table: most code is glue, compromise, and maintenance in the service of an outcome.

The subtext is also a quiet defense of pragmatism. Lerdorf, best known for creating PHP, has long been associated with a tool that’s been mocked as inelegant yet endured because it got work done. Read through that history, the quote is a shot at programmer vanity: if you’re in love with programming itself, you may optimize for cleverness over utility. If you love solving problems, you tolerate ugly code, imperfect tools, and boring tasks so long as they move the needle.

Contextually, it’s a scientist’s posture smuggled into software: methods are secondary to results. It’s also an implicit critique of the industry’s habit of turning means into ends - frameworks as fashion, complexity as proof of intelligence. Lerdorf’s bluntness isn’t anti-technology; it’s anti-theater.