Friend: I dunno why people need to make my life difficult with all this canned shit.
Me: Because programmers don’t know what they are doing—it’s simply about the right tool for the right job. If they found a letter opener, they think it’s fucking Excalibur. To them, the one shit framework/library/application/programming language/development environment they know is a fucking Swiss knife and they think they’re god-damn MacGuyver.
Original article posted to PHP Advent 2009, Click to jump to discussion. Happy Holidays to you and yours!
Even the best of us can only write 1500 lines of code a day, so we need to make those lines count.
There were so many great articles in PHP Advent this year, that I couldn’t think of a good topic—I like to believe my peers stole all the good ideas this year… 🙂
Continue reading about Read about 1500 lines of code after the jump
(Full disclaimer: I work at Automattic and am a speaker at PHP conferences.)
A couple days ago, Gina Trapani posted an interesting article on learning to program.
This reminds me that some people may take the wrong points away in my last article on the subject, the priority shouldn’t be what language you should learn, but rather, what is going to get you motivated to learn. PHP is a popular language because it naturally invites “immersion” style learning, not because it makes a good teaching language—which it doesn’t. That is, assuming the thing you are immersing in is “building a website”. As I like to say:
In the comments, I wrote:
After [the first] chapter, I’d say [PHP and MySQL Development]offers the most “immersion” gratification (at the least cost) than any other language’s textbook. The chapters are easy and by the end of it you have an eStore written and working from scratch. What do you get at the end of the Learning Python book? And how easy was each subsequent chapter? I’d say much less and much harder.
…
[Unfortunately,] it’s that first chapter that does the first timer in.
Continue reading about More about learning web programming after the jump.
“Five million, bitches”
—my new reply every time someone mentions Ruby
A friend of mine is learning to program, and how to learn a programming language came up.
There is a lot of people who are non-programmers or have taken programming classes and not yet learned to program. When I was a kid, those languages were BASIC, Logo, and Karel the Robot, now they are things like C#, Java, and Ruby. Still the same problem of “what programming language to start” rears its ugly head.
Continue reading about About learning a language after the jump