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Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

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Re: Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

#22
post #16

"Realized that my friends will forever make fun of me if I stay on PHP" That was lame. "Considered Cake as well, but went with CodeIgniter mainly because I had friends that had used it" Can you see a pattern here?

Yes. It's really easy to learn things when you have a support network turn to for questions and advice.

>I need someone to hold my hand

Re: Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

#24

Ruby as a language feels a little strange. Maybe it was designed for hipsters. If I had a dog, it would bark at Ruby code. I'd love to know why. The way this is written makes it feel less like opinion and more an opportunity to take a pop. Ruby seems susceptible to this sort of "hipster" callout in a way other languages aren't. Confusing a language with its comically unfairly defined userbase, perhaps?

Well, Ruby on Rails has as its mantra "Convention over configuration" which naturally lends itself to an experience filled with Rails-isms. I think the language has similar leanings, so you end up with a bunch of Ruby-isms as well. For example methods ending with ! mutate their receiver, and methods ending with ? return booleans. None of this is enforced at a language level but it is still part of standard Ruby practice. You end up with an ecosystem of opinionated software built on an opinionated platform, which makes many people -- myself included -- feel a little bit like an outsider when I read Ruby code that is littered with little idioms.

Re: Evolution of a Web Developer: From PHP Newbie To Python Ninja

#29
post #5

This is really good stuff. The roadmap from beginner to expert is generally consistent irregardless of the language or framework. I always hoped for a "knowledge map" for programming (example: http://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard ) that clearly shows knowledge dependancies. Can this be a step towards developing a comprehensive, collaborative knowledge map which would benefit programmers of all levels?

It's interesting. Reading through the list, it was a lot of "things I learned a long time ago" interspersed with "things I learned fairly recently".

Having started doing web development before Django and jQuery were released, I definitely learned about JavaScript debuggers, POST requests, CAPTCHAs, AJAX (which, by the way, was positively painful before the invention of JSON), XHTML and the validation thereof, fake CAPTCHAs, cookies, passing session IDs in GET requests for people who block cookies, returning dynamically-generated images to an HTTP request... long before I ever learned about web frameworks, ORM, or any of those things.

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