Python – The Woodwork

Sometimes they really are indistinguishable

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
—Arthur C. Clarke

When a non-techie friend of mine moved to San Francisco, she overheard two guys talking next to her.

“What are you up to,” one of them asks?

The other replied, “Oh, I’m trying to learn Python.”

“Excuse me,” my friend interrupted them. “But I believe it’s called Parseltongue.”

(After living here for a while longer, she became very embarrassed. And though it wasn’t exactly what he meant, I still think Mr. Clarke would approve.)

You lost me there, bub

Reading [this blog post ranting on PHP][phphorrors]

> No corporation supports PHP’s growth & maturity like Sun & Google do for Java, Google (Guido van Rossum) for Python (jnc Django framework), Ruby (inc RoR) by 37 signals etc…

37Signals & Ruby? Thank his noodly appendage PHP’s support isn’t as terrible as that company on that language.

You lost me there, bub.

When it comes to engineering choice, programming language is not even in the top 10 of important choices a software architect has to make. If you’re worried about the language, you’re worried about the wrong thing. (I’m also a little amused that the author holds Python as a language with great unicode support.)

[phphorrors]:http://www.theroadtosiliconvalley.com/technology/php-coding-horrors-poor-excuses/ “PHP: coding horrors & poor excuses—The Road to Silicon Valley”

Learning Programming Part 3: C/C++ superiority

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?

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:Continue reading about Python vs. PHP for web after the jump

1500 Lines of Code

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

Learning Programming Part 2: Programming Frameworks

: 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.

Continue reading about More about learning web programming after the jump.