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  PHP sucks (but, some frameworks don't)

I started web development with PHP, and I've decided I've had enough. Why? Keep reading.PHP (the language) sucks. There, I said it. 1029380128301928301823 GlobalsObject system hacked onC extension system sucksDocumentation sucks (read more; no, I'm not drunk)Has a terrible communityAll in all, designed by total idiots. You've probably heard this a ton of times before, but, here it is again. THERE ARE JUST WAY TOO MANY GLOBALS. Why in the world does md5() need to be global? Do you serio...

   PHP,Sucks,Framework,Good,Bad Design     2011-11-20 07:08:16

  I'm Retiring from PHP

I am retiring from PHP as my language of choice for personal side projects and new programming ventures. This was not an easy decision to come to, but one that I think is necessary for my love of programming to continue. You see, I'm not only a programmer because I love programming, but because I can not do anything else. History It all started in 1999 when I was in 8th grade. The Internet was really starting to get interesting and I wanted to start programming. I had picked up...

   PHP,Scala,Programming,Language     2011-06-27 07:36:25

  Why Objective-C is Hard

As an active member of "The Internet" and vocal Objective-C coder, I get a lot of questions surrounding the language. They're often framed around thinking about learning the language or trying to write an app, but they also usually involve a phrase like "Objective-C looks really hard" or "what are all those minus signs about?" Both of these are pretty good questions, and I'd like to address why someone might be more hesitant to jump into iOS or OS X development compared to, say, Ruby or J...

   Objective-C,difficult,hard,reason,analysis     2012-03-07 05:11:28

  A Solution to CPU-intensive Tasks in IO Loops

Back in October 2011, Ted Dziuba infamously said that Node.js is Cancer.  A provocative title to a provocative article.  The only thing it didn’t really provoke in the commentary was much thought ;)  Zing. My interpretation of the article is that Ted holds up the classic blocking-IO process-per-request (or  thread per request; same difference) model as superior.  Yet we all remember where the blocking-IO forking model got Apache in the early days.  ...

   CPU,Intensive IO loops,Solution,C++     2012-02-06 07:42:40

  Why I Still Use Emacs

At school, I’m known as the Emacs guy; when people have questions about configuring Emacs or making it work a certain way, they often come and ask me. Sometimes, some people ask me why use Emacs at all? Isn’t it a really old editor and aren’t Eclipse or Visual Studio much better? I mean, they don’t have weird key bindings and have intellisense, that’s surely better for a programmer, right? I will attempt in this post to explain some of the reasons why I still c...

   Linux,Emacs,Editor,Advantage,IDE     2012-02-20 05:30:41

  The Essence of Google Dart: Building Applications, Snapshots, Isolates

WÑ–th thousands of programming languages floating around, why is Google introducing Google Dart? What can it possibly add? The short answer: the Google Dart team wanted a language well suited to modern application development, both on the server and the (mobile) client. Some of Dart's features address problems that languages like Java or Javascript have long had. Dart's Snapshots resemble Smalltalk images, allowing (nearly) instant application startup and wi...

   Dart,Google,Client side,Web,Language,Snapshort,Isolate     2011-10-24 11:41:16

  What the Heck are Algebraic Data Types? ( for Programmers )

This post is meant to be a gentle introduction to Algebraic Data Types. Some of you may be asking why you should learn Algebraic Data Types and how will they change your world?  I am not going to answer that, but suffice it to say that Algebraic Data Types are the underpinning of the type systems to the ML derived languages, Haskell and OCaml included, and their construction and properties allow for the power (and inference) that accompanies these type systems.  They are cropping...

   Algebraic Data Type,Set,Operator,Programmer     2011-12-30 08:31:43

  Java is not the new COBOL

If you Google “Java is the new COBOL” you’ll find a glut of articles proliferating this mantra. I don’t know its origins, however I’m inclined to think it’s mostly repeated (and believed) by the Ruby community. Ruby, from a developer’s perspective is a low-friction language. A developer can just sit down at a text editor and start banging out code without really thinking about such superflous things as types. Java on the other hand, well, you h...

   Java,Ruby,Type,COBOL,Comparison     2011-11-10 10:40:56

  A Month With Scala

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my las...

   Scala,Functional,OOP,Java,Iteration     2011-12-10 06:03:23

  Why I love everything you hate about Java

If you’re one of those hipster programmers who loves Clojure, Ruby, Scala, Erlang, or whatever, you probably deeply loathe Java and all of its giant configuration files and bloated APIs of AbstractFactoryFactoryInterfaces. I used to hate all that stuff too. But you know what? After working for all these months on these huge pieces of Twitter infrastructure I’ve started to love the AbstractFactoryFactories. Let me explain why. Consider this little Scala program. It uses â€...

   Java,Comparison,Modularity,API     2011-11-29 08:48:15

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