PPH - Profanity per Hour

July 29th, 2006 by Justin Ball

I have been working on getting some CSS to work for a new design for The Plan Collection. The payoff is terribly small. I am really starting to hate CSS and the new "tableless" world of web design. I have spent and enourmous amount of time working around bugs in browsers and find new ways of getting things to work. CSS is pretty miserable to work with. Don't believe me? Here's an entire article on getting footers to work. That is not the only one in my list of bookmarks. Should it really take an entire article to figure out how to get stuff to stay at the bottom of the page?

I am annoyed can you tell?

I have come up with a new measure of the usefullness of a programing language. It has nothing to do with lines of code but rather the rate and degree of profanity required to complete a task. Right now CSS is pretty high. The old ASP was pretty high too. Flash had moments when the meter went so far off the chart as to justify me being sent straight to hell. With ASP.Net the meter is usually pretty low unless I need to do something that is not supported by the framework or something that is not the .Net way. I think Ruby on Rails has required only a handful of colorful metaphors, and those were related to setup not to code. C++ is up there. Writing drivers for Windows in C++ requires that no one be around me less their ears burst into flames.

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4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Nobody Listens Anyway » Edge Rails, OpenID and the Dreaded Sorry, the OpenID verification failed” error Sep 17, 2007 at 4:25 pm

    [...] one day it all stopped working and my PPH (Profanity Per Hour) went through the roof. We have Capistrano setup. I had another guy deploy 51week and OpenID [...]

  • 2 eidosabi Sep 21, 2007 at 3:54 am

    I told my dad about PPH, I thought he was going to go into cardiac arrest right there on the phone he was laughing _that_ hard.

  • 3 No I Won’t Fix Your @!#$!@#$ Computer : Nobody Listens Anyway Oct 8, 2007 at 12:33 am

    [...] write code. It means I can talk about servers and argue about what programming languages are best (Check out PPH for the standard measure for programming languages.) It means I can build cool website or write scripts that help my wife manage photos or I can [...]

  • 4 Clay Jan 5, 2009 at 10:49 am

    I find CSS much easier to do when I start totally from scratch (i.e. designing the layout with the capabilities in mind). Try to take a table-based layout and convert it to CSS is straight out of Dante.