Through the Void
So, the CMS is in beta, meaning my programming muscles are no longer tasked with work people will use productively on a day to day basis, so it’s time to start diving into Sigma (in earnest) soon.
Based on a phone conversation wtih Dadio, I had to repeat the highlight of my vocal day yesterday, in which I was finally able to say:
“The issue has been fixed upstream in Trunk.”
Which to a programmer would be akin to a Navy pilot’s first “requesting fly-by” radio transmission. Just a hint of win in there to sweeten the sensation of nearing completion on a big, difficult project.
How do I feel about PHP? I know you didn’t ask that, but it’s what this textarea in my blog software is asking me right now.
Do I know how I feel about PHP? PHP gets things done. How does it get them done? About the way I likely would have gotten them done in eighth grade. Dig (not Digg) this. Explain why half the functions down the left pane are prepended with array_ and the other half are not.
PHP is basically the closest thing to a Microsoft C API you can get. “Oh, well, it was stupid at PHP 4.0.5 and we couldn’t break MediaWiki, which relied on the stupidity to save three lines of code in 1.1.2 beta, so it’s still here in PHP 5.0.0.” But it’s going away in PHP 5.4, so watch out, buddy.
What PHP rocks at is giving you functions, like, say, this one and this one and this one that are so time-savingly delicious you just can’t help but deal with all the backwards-compatibility refuse to eat up.
Of course, Python is good at most of this stuff and makes at least some sense from a style standpoint (even more to come in Python 3000, I read). But, despite having some lovely frameworks, I can’t get settled with developing for a platform that is almost universally shunned by shared webhosts.
In this respect, “requires mod_python” has about the same ring to my ears as “dry clean only,” which are both messages I tend to read only after getting committedly excited about the product.