161–170 of 214 posts
For something fun yet with that elusive 'real programming' edge, play around with Rust.
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> if you chose PHP (or worse program in it because it was what you inherited as well) you are a "lesser programmer". If you choose php, I will assume that you. 1. Either is not aware of that php has a million gotchas that you need to avoid at every step. Take a look at the ever growing (!) list at /r/lolphp. 2. You don't see the significance of the aforementioned gotchas. For eg, you can show things like php's regist…
You can assume whatever the hell you want it doesn't really matter to me since I'm well aware of 1 and 2.
And for programming languages, the environment includes the used coding standards -- which need to avoid lots of the crufty pitfalls all environments do have.
That said, I don't know enough PHP to have a real opinion.
(Yep, I'm hellbanned.)
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I wasn't making any value judgment on web development's difficulty. Bootstrap versus material design isn't some top-notch innovation like you portray it. It's a bikeshed issue. Most people use Bootstrap as a formulaic placeholder, and material design is a Google trend. It isn't any more relevant to the web development community at large than Microsoft's Metro is. NoSQL is ancient, and the value of NoSQL is in special…
Fair point, I bring Bootstrap up as an example of how frequently the actual frameworks relied on to build things on the web change. A better example of is the endless paradigms popping up to handle highly interactive javascript. RE: NoSQL and SQL, I agree and I understand the nuance (my go-to database is PostgreSQL), I'm just pointing it out as "another thing" web developers need to understand. And that's the point I…
The reason for learning many of these "other things" is precisely because of your limitations to the confines of the browser's VM, where all superior OS APIs must be poorly reimplemented (Web Workers, local/session storage, WebSockets, WebAudio, the file API, etc.) to get around the fact that the web was designed as a file server for static documents. In the process, the same-origin policy was gutted through cross-origin resource sharing and cross-domain messaging.
These same limitations partly inspire the massive framework churn, most of which are formulaic.
The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…
> it doesn't matter if it's vim or emacs or notepad Yes! it matters if it's plain vanilla notepad, notepad++ would be better, you don't want to see someone else code opened in notepad, tabs and spaces and newlines will mixed like spaghetti.
What a crock! What a good reason to stay away from online forums like reddit! The userface of any software, done well, is painstaking and valuable work. It's a poor craftsman who blames his own tools. It's a freakin' troll who blames other peoples' tools.
This has been going on since the beginning of the computer industry. Real mean program in machine language: assemblers are for wimps. COBOL? feh.
This is nonsense. By this reasoning, Michaelangelo was incompetent because of his choice of painting materials.
I hope Joel's article will be seen by lots of people, and that our trade can mature.
Back in the 80s when I was in uni, the only job I could get in the area was in a language called dBASE (later Clipper). Nothing like the "real" languages we learned in school. BUT, we got stuff done, quickly, to allow entry and reporting against the data kept on the "real computers". A few years later, after graduation, at that job, I got to see a "C" program somebody wrote to tie into one of the systems I did to speed up a batch process, as I needed to fix a few things in it. It was a real enlightenment to see how bad the code was (in some ways). I didn't feel so bad about what I did after being able to fix this "expert" code.
Don't let the bastards get you down, as they say.
PS - I've been a Java programmer for the last decade, but I'm doing Angular on an overhaul project at my latest job. I like Javascript (feels like the rich, "local", UI stuff I did in the 80s, all over again), but CSS is hard. Don't feel bad about "only" knowing web page stuff.
and ... many other posters already mentioned the primary importance of simply earning a living, honestly.
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Php is still a super effective lever for people starting out. It has some really bad technical warts but it has the shortest path to "shit's on screen" amongst web-based scripting languages. I may not like it, but it has its place.
>but it has the shortest path to "shit's on screen" amongst web-based scripting languages Let us see. You follow the shortest path to make a service/web app. I use your service/app. You get hacked. (By the way, has the php community yet have a clue how the php.net site got hacked, like, I don't know, 2 years back?), I am fucked. Who wins? Instead, what if you put in the effort to actually educate yourself about the s…
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>but it has the shortest path to "shit's on screen" amongst web-based scripting languages Let us see. You follow the shortest path to make a service/web app. I use your service/app. You get hacked. (By the way, has the php community yet have a clue how the php.net site got hacked, like, I don't know, 2 years back?), I am fucked. Who wins? Instead, what if you put in the effort to actually educate yourself about the s…
How thick-headed are you? Is anything you read in this thread getting through to you?
The motivation behind developers dissing each other for their chosen field of work and their tools is absolutely puzzling, and it does real harm. Nobody would assert that printf("hello world!"); epitomizes systems programming, yet print($foo); is apparently considered synonymous with web development and lowest of the unspeakable arts. Inept programming can be found all over the place. A newbie program doesn't magical…
As someone who's built a career on (mostly) writing PHP, this this this. It is indeed incredibly easy to write "working", terrible, insecure PHP. Honestly, people who write garbage PHP would write garbage rails/python/node too, because the errors fall into a few buckets:
1. Not using a framework's API/reimplementing boilerplate poorly.
2. Not paying attention to user-generated input (escaping, etc).
3. Not using best practices for major tasks (e.g., manually mysql_connect()'ing instead of using PDO)
4. Failures in logic ("brain farts").
These problems are the same in any language. If you CBA to pay attention to the basics in PHP, you won't do it in rails either. Blame the programmer, not the language.
The counterargument is that some languages won't let you make these mistakes, but the counter-counter is that those people would make those mistakes if they could, which is not really an improvement IMO.
There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…
I wanted to say something like your comment is just 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, but then I'd be 2nd order making you feel bad about 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, so then I just thought about how I felt and it was bad. What a mess. Good points about the importance of choosing a good peer group, I totally agree. It's really hard whe…