Learning Programming Part 4: “Programming is Hard”

Posted on 8 November 2011 by Terry Chay

Programming, it turns out, is hard.
—Eloquent Javascript (and typical)

A few months ago, a girl expressed to me her frustrations about, in particular, the attitude expressed many engineers on her attempts to learn to programming.

“They act like learning programming is hard. They imply that if you haven’t been programming since you were seven, there’s no hope for you,” she explained.

I opined, “If someone can learn to program when they are seven, then it must not be that difficult.”

…

Think of all the things you couldn’t do when you were seven—programming is less difficult than all of those.

Learning Programming Part 3: C/C++ superiority

Posted on 22 July 2010 by Terry Chay

Previously, Part 1 and Part 2.

The other day, Marie pointed me to an interesting article where Jolie O’Dell decides to go back to school to get a computer science degree. She asked me what my thoughts were on some comments concerning the necessity of learning C/C++. I’ll paraphrase in order to avoid singling anyone out.

“Scripting languages create holes in proper programming. All a language, like PHP, will do is make you a PHP programmer, while a language like C or C++ will give you a fundamental understanding that can be applied to all languages and make you a better programmer no matter what the language. This is because these languages expose you to the way the computer really works (instead of abstraction): for instance, how a string is really created, or an array, or dynamic memory allocation. If you learn PHP, you will never bother to learn the low-level reality.”

The above is a munge of many commenters’ discussions.

What do you think of the above statement? Continue reading my reply after the jump. →

Who puts the P in LAMP?

Posted on 7 January 2010 by Terry Chay

Received this yesterday:

So I’m thinking of starting a new web project and was wondering if I could seek your advice. My tendency is to use PHP since that’s what I know and have used most in the past. Though, after talking to a lot of folks (namely Googlers…go figure), I’ve been encouraged to instead choose Python. Seeing as you’re my favorite PHP Terrorist I was wondering if you have any specific thoughts on the subject.

I still need to write another article on Python, but the short answer is I think if it’s web, PHP is probably the better choice.

“PHP is the shortest point between two distances on the web.” —Me, tongue-tied at a talk

However there are some mitigating factors to consider: Python vs. PHP for web after the jump

1500 Lines of Code

Posted on 21 December 2009 by Terry Chay

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

Learning Programming Part 2: Programming Frameworks

Posted on 13 November 2009 by Terry Chay

: Image via Wikipedia

(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.

More about learning web programming after the jump.

Learning Programming Part 1: 5 million

Posted on 27 July 2009 by Terry Chay

“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.

About learning a language