Science Quote by Rasmus Lerdorf

A mild confession that lands like a grenade in a culture built on developer worship. Coming from Rasmus Lerdorf, the reluctant father of PHP, "I don't like programming. It's tedious" reads less like a tantrum than a corrective: stop romanticizing the act of coding and start paying attention to what coding is for.

The intent is disarmingly practical. Programming, in the day-to-day reality of shipping software, is repetition, debugging, edge cases, regressions, glue code, and the quiet exhaustion of making machines behave. Lerdorf is puncturing the myth that real technologists are fueled by pure passion for syntax. The subtext is almost managerial: if you need love-of-coding as a prerequisite, you're going to design teams, tools, and careers that burn people out and gatekeep everyone else.

Context matters because PHP itself embodies this pragmatism. It was born as a messy set of tools to solve a personal web problem, then scaled into an ecosystem people loved to mock for inelegance even as it ran the internet. Lerdorf's line rejects the aesthetic contest. He implies that "good" engineering isn't a personality type; it's problem selection, tradeoffs, and maintenance over time.

There's also a quiet scientific stance here: results over rituals. Scientists don't typically fetishize pipettes; they care about experiments. Lerdorf is saying code is the pipette. Necessary, occasionally finicky, rarely romantic. The sting is aimed at a tech culture that confuses the tedious instrument with the point of the work.