Nice summary. Anyway, it seems he haven't tried Go seriously yet.
Software in 2014
201–210 of 265 posts
Re: Software in 2014
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Elitist?" I came into web development via the PHP tradesman's entrance, and until by the grace of God I found my way out into the wider world, I didn't even begin to suspect just how miserable I had it. If there's a tinge of elitism in the wider world's attitude toward PHP, I'll be the first to contend that it's justified.
Yeah I think you are more like an ex-smoker who after you managed to quit tells everyone who awful smoking is :)
Not really a parallel; you'll never meet a long-time cigarette smoker who doesn't know how awful a habit it is, although you'll probably meet some who will lie about it.
On the other hand -- and I say this as a smoker, albeit as one who's cut back his habit to almost nothing over the last couple years -- smoking is an awful habit, which is both severely addictive and without meaningful benefit for the person with the habit or for anyone else. So I suppose I'm not all that inclined to quibble about the not-quite-perfect parallel, after all. :)
Re: Software in 2014
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? Part of the reason PHP is such a disgusting mess is because it is a raft of haphazardly accumulated features.
For someone that works on Go at Google I'm shocked by your very much subjective view of PHP. Elitist much?
I wrote PHP code for 10 years. You could say my relationship with the language is pretty subjective.
Re: Software in 2014
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
That comment didn't even come across as elitist. There was no need to get personal.
He works on Go at Google. A skilled professional no doubt, could he not have made some valid points rather than simply calling PHP disgusting. It didn't add anything to the conversation. If you where in the pub and someone spent some time listing the virtues of the pint they where drinking, and then someone joined in the conversation and called it disgusting with no basis .. wouldn't you find that to be odd behavior?
Sorry if I upset you. Your feature list is no stronger a point than my response, though. Features don't make a language great. Clarity, consistency, simplicity, and orthogonality do. PHP has none of those qualities. I know, because I used it extensively for a decade.
I stand by my comment. I can see why people like PHP but nobody in their right mind should deny that it is a mess and that it was constructed haphazardly.
Re: Software in 2014
#205TL;DR - "Fortunately for your users but unfortunately for you," users in today's world expect amazing UX, on their platform of choice (largely iOS and Android), aren't willing to compromise on speed, usability, or access, and it means engineering is harder. We live in a world of amazing user experiences and products, and if that means more engineering work, so be it. If we limited our products to what's easy engineering wise, we'd still have crappy products and experiences.
Re: Software in 2014
#206> The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. If memory is your problem in 2014 and you're not creating some data analyzer application, you might be doing something wrong. If CPU is your problem and you're not creating a game, I think you're really doing something wrong. Battery drain is the only real bottleneck. Frankly I'm surprised how fast it went and how fast mobile devices are nowadays.…
Doubt you're a mobile dev. Phones may have gigs of ram but, for example, an Android app is capped at a 64MB heap. If your app has any large images that heap can fill with bitmaps quite quickly.
Re: Software in 2014
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved? Sounds to me like you've never developed seriously on an ARM chipset. These devices are worlds apart from your standard desktop, there is a reason that both Android and IOS dropped Adobe flash. It's partly the hardware and p…
Even on the slow (by smartphone standards) Nexus One, Flash ran quite decently. The Nexus 5 is a good magnitude faster in every way (I can't find specific parity-version benchmarks, so perhaps I'll fire both of them up and give it a go), moreso in some ways like the GPU, and is as powerful as some desktops that people still use in business settings. It would of course have no problem with Flash. Flash failed because…
Flash would have been unsupported (or b0rked) in iOS whatever happened: it would have allowed others to compete with the App Store.
Sure, there were technical arguments, but you're naive if you think that they key to the decision.
Re: Software in 2014
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
He probably didn't elaborate because he felt the basis for the view was clear - there are clearly areas of PHP which still need work. PHP is often frowned upon because the APIs are a mess of legacy cruft like addslashes, magic_quotes, mysql_escape_string, mysql_real_escape_string, mysqli_real_escape_string versus prepared statements. Efforts are being made to clean it up, but for a language to ever end up in a place…
mysql_escape_string [1] mysql_real_escape_string [2] Why is exposing a C library's functions and their names PHP's fault? [1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-escape-string.h... [2] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysql-real-escape-str...
Because php ends up combining the API consistency of C with the syntactic elegance of visual basic. I say this as someone who programs php professionally, the fact that they still haven't provided a complete set of OO api's very much speaks against the language stewards. PHP could have a sane subset, like javascript, but because there are gaps in the API (like the string and array API's, which are horrible) you can't get a sane subset without adding some extra API wrappers of your own.
And that's why it's impossible to build frameworkless PHP code that is elegant, something that even the designed-in-10-days javascript lets you do.
Still, i like php for its getting things done mentality. What it lacks in elegance it makes up for in productivity.
Re: Software in 2014
#209Notice how everything he writes about mobile development is wrong? > First of all, you have to do your mobile development twice Nope, there are plenty of frameworks with large user bases, both OSS and with corporate backend to do it once. From Xamarin to PhoneGap. Especially 2D game developers are spoiled for choice. > The devices are memory-starved, CPU-starved, and battery-starved. The devices have never been bette…
> there are iOS bindings for all popular languages (and I've used several) Care to list some, other than Xamarin and RubyMotion?
Delphi lets you do single codebase iOS, android, windows and mac native apps that render their ui to opengl and are therefore really fast.
Ofcourse, you have to write objectpascal, which is not a popular language, but once you get over the weirdness it is more productive than C++ while still giving you pure native software. It even has closures these days :)
Re: Software in 2014
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Xamarin and Phonegap are completely different beasts. You are thinking about Phonegap now. Xamarin ones are natively built ones; you use Apple classes to build everything but just in C# instead of Objective-C. So you have to rebuild the frontend twice indeed for Android and iOS but it does look and function 'native' as if you did it with Xcode. Phonegap => not so much; most just works like shit, but you only have to…
Sorry, I got Xamarin confused with Titanium, which was a pretty bad experience for me for the week that I tried it. If I tried to do anything fancy, it was completely useless. Also any time you are using 3rd party tools like Titanium / Xamarin to develop these apps it comes with gotchas / limitations that may not even be worth it in the end (it seems like Xamarin has less gotchas). The main issue is that you still ha…
Sure, but there aren't really any alternatives. When you build advanced apps HTML5 is depressing for apps at the moment. It will happen, but not this year.