A commenter on my last article jokes:
I thought : “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” was Robbie Wiliams stuff!
I should issue a couple of corrections to improper attributions in that article.
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… 
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:
PHP is the shortest distance between two points on the web.
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.
Raffi, a co-worker of mine at Automattic, mentioned today that his project, After the Deadline, is now open-source.
It might help to explain what After the Deadline is.
What is After the Deadline and more about the open-source project after the jump
A friend asked me today:
Why isn’tshort_open_tagset toOnin php.ini at [servers you set up] or in general?
Basically short_open_tag allows you to use <? and <?= in addition to <?php when formatting code. The latter can be very useful if you are using PHP as a templating language—like with Savant or no templating system at all.
Many people think that there is a security reason for this. For the life of me, I can’t really see the security problem with the setting though I can see the security problem with the coding. That is… if you code using short_open_tags, then you run the risk of running that code on a server where this variable it is off somewhere and suddenly you are dumping PHP code to people’s browsers. But that almost never happens and really if you have a configuration issue, you have bigger problems.
The real reason is simply that it violates valid XML markup to use short tags. Simply put, let’s say you have an example where your PHP page has to generate a valid XML file that needs a XML directive.
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
With short_open_tags, this will generate a fatal error in the PHP engine! The workaround is to do something nasty like
echo '<'.'?xml version="1.0" ?>';
(or some such). As more websites contained XHTML or some weird sort of sacrifice to the Gods of all things XML (SOAP, XMLRPC, REST-XML), it was sooner convenient to admit defeat and just start coding in valid XML markup.
It violates valid xml. It was not recommended for use because it isn’t guaranteed to be on everywhere. Ever since then people have been in the habit of not using short tags just in case they are off. Soon, it became part of the php.ini-recommended and short tags, like asp_tags and the alternative syntax for control structures got relegated to the dustbin of history.
What is the alternative syntax for control structures? Let’s not go there. 
As someone who worked at Tagged, I can say that profit-sharing with game developers like Zynga have been instrumental to make our revenue numbers. If they make this much off us, I shudder to think how much they’re pulling in from open API networks like Facebook and MySpace.
(Not to mention way to many hours wasted on Mafia Wars and Poker. )
In any case, another PHP job posting…
“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.
The issue is that there is a lot of people who are non-programmers and have taken programming classes and not 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 rears its ugly head.
Two and a half years ago, when first wrestling with the Tagged codebase, I asked Andrei about replacing all my PHP includes with __autoload. I was told under no uncertain terms to not do this.
It’s not that Andrei is wrong in his admonition. Far from it! For reasons that I don’t quite care to know, there are caching and lookup optimizations that APC cannot do when it has to switch context to run __autoload. But the problem in practice was two-fold:
At a certain point, optimization gives way to convenience and practicality.
For Tagged, this was that PHP would allocate 12MB/80ms to say “hello world”, 20MB/465ms to display the homepage, and 22MB/1965ms/1207ms to return my profile page
After the rewrite it takes 0.3MB/3ms to say hello world and 3.7MB/109ms to return my profile page.
My friend Robb just IM’d me to tell me he’s released a new PHP framework.
Friend: http://twitter.com/markscrap/status/1228353533 Me: 10 to 1 whatever kid wrote that is a ruby developer Friend: haha
I’m just stating the obvious. When the first computer was invented, the legendary Grace Hopper created the first compiled programming language. That language is still around and is still popular today!
Programming languages don’t “die,” they proliferate.
And when a person makes blanket statements like, “PHP is a dying language,” it allows me to a make blanket statement about that person’s programming preferences and maturity.
The difference is, my statement is probably right.
