Posts tagged: PROGRAMMING

People are always going on about how it “only” takes twenty minutes or whatever to knock together some little application. Screencasts don’t count, unless they are screencasts of somebody who hasn’t done any preparation. But damn, I just built a trouble-ticket system in Django in twenty minutes. Really. Of course, I already had a running install, this is just something I added. But it was instantly useful. I assigned four tickets to myself and now I can go have dinner.

If you frequent any online programmer haunts you may have already been exposed to the writings of Steve Yegge, a former Amazon.com software developer and a technical ranter par excellence. Yegge has re-published his rants, most of which were originally written for an internal audience of developers at Amazon, to the web at large. He urges people not to take them too seriously, but there’s a lot of truth in them. Oh, and they’re wickedly funny.

Ironic that I find myself defending PHP at a point when I’m making a huge effort to move most of my web coding to Python, but I keep running across mini-rants along the lines of “PHP sucks because it mixes business logic into your HTML.”

No, it doesn’t.

It makes it possible, sure. But it’s completely avoidable. As The Daily WTF can show you, it’s possible to do screwy things in any language.

In recent weeks I’ve been listening to the back-catalog of Ajaxian podcasts while commuting. It’s been great food for thought for me, since I’m one of those people who retreated to the server side years ago to avoid the horror of incompatible, standards-oblivious browsers and crazed animated status bar messages. Things seem to have gotten a lot better, to say the least.

Here are some things that these podcasts have prompted me to think about:

My “Let’s play a game” post, featuring a simple number game implemented in three different scripting languages, has received many comments and updates in the few weeks it’s been up. There are now twelve implementations, seven written by me (wide variations in quality!) and five contributed by readers. The languages represented, as of today: Haskell, Io, JavaScript, Lisp, Logo, Lua, PHP, Prolog, Python, REBOL, Ruby, and Scheme.

I’ve learned a hell of a lot, and gotten some good ideas about which languages might be rewarding to dive into further. My favorite new discovery so far is Io. It’s clean, simple, consistent, and yet very pragmatic at the same time (e.g. lots of useful bindings, embeddable, etc.). The messaging syntax feels very natural, and the lack of brackets (cf. Objective-C) gives more than just visual relief: you don’t have to backtrack to the beginning of the expression to insert a bracket when you decide you need to chain one more message on the end.

Gearing up for some programming-language-related posts, I’ve been thinking about the languages I’ve been exposed to over the years (those years being, specifically, 1981 to 2006).

To the best of my memory, everything I’ve ever written more than “Hello World” in is listed below. Languages that are italic I’ve written useful, if sometimes small, programs in. Languages that are bold are languages I’ve been paid to code in – though that includes things like selling shareware games as a teenager!

It’s long been a rule of mine to avoid broadband providers’ installer software whenever possible. (As Mos Def’s character says in “The Italian Job”: I HAD A BAD EXPERIENCE.)

The intrepid Daniel Jalkut recently posted a great dissection of a Verizon “upgrade” script gone off the tracks, explaining why it was so bad and how it could have been even worse – hard-drive-wipingly worse.

It didn’t even stuff a bunch of Verizon marketing bookmarks in there to pretty up the browser. Just a big gaping hole where my bookmarks (in the bookmark bar and menu) used to be…