Sloppy is not Orthogonal

Ian Bicking blogs that orthoganality is overrated, and gives points to PHP for helping users to get things done, in contrast to frameworks which try hard to separate presentation from logic.

I believe Ian’s remarks are very similar to what Dan Bricklin said in an IT Conversations podcast. VisiCalc was powerful because it imposes minimal constraints, i.e. your data has to be placed in a 2 dimensional grid. What else you do with it is entirely up to you. Dan said that his mother – a school teacher – had been using spreadsheets to keep class lists, and did not know until recently that one can create formulae to add cell values together. That’s the beauty of sloppy design, you don’t have to know the advanced features to make something useful.