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  TIOBE: PHP is coming back

TIOBE released the programming language index for July 2013. The highlight of this month is that PHP is coming back. It ranks the fifth and has an increase of 1.54% compared to January. There are no changes in the ranking for the top 4 languages. The reason why PHP is back may be attributed to the new PHP Zend Framework that was released in September 2012, but this reason is not very convincing. PositionJul 2013PositionJul 2012Delta in PositionProgramming LanguageRatingsJul 2013Delta Jul...

   TIOBE,PHP,Zend framework,July     2013-07-09 05:22:50

  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

  Prototypes and Object Orientation

David Chisnall takes a look at the two dominant paradigms in object-oriented languages (classes and prototypes) and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each.Two terms are quite often confused when describing programming languages:class-based and object-oriented:Simula was the first class-based language. It provided classes (actually implemented using closures) as a means of encapsulating abstract data types.Smalltalk was the first object-oriented language. It provided a...

   Prototype,OOP,Differential,Comparison,Mo     2011-09-02 11:51:26

  Can Your Programming Language Do This?

One day, you're browsing through your code, and you notice two big blocks that look almost exactly the same. In fact, they're exactly the same, except that one block refers to "Spaghetti" and one block refers to "Chocolate Moose." // A trivial example: alert("I'd like some Spaghetti!"); alert("I'd like some Chocolate Moose!"); These examples happen to be in JavaScript, but even if you don't know JavaScript, you should be able to follow along. The repeated code looks wrong, ...

   Programming,Maintainability,Reusable     2011-05-31 07:42:41

  Data as code

What is a good command line parser API? A good command line parser should consider below 5 aspects: Support convenient help information generation Support sub commands, for example, git has push,pull,commit sub commands. Support single character option, word option, flag option and option with parameter. Support default option, for example, if no -port is set, set it as 5037 Support usage model, for example, tar's -c and -x is mutually exclusive, they belong to different usage models. Here are...

   Command line,API     2013-08-08 22:40:36

  Convert time to Unix time

Unix time is defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), 1 January 1970,not counting leap seconds. It is used widely in Unix-like and many other operating systems and file formats. It is neither a linear representation of time nor a true representation of UTC. Unix time may be checked on some Unix systems by typing date +%s on the command line. Sometimes it's a bit difficult to compare times stored in different applications or systems with ...

   UNIX time, Oracle DATE, conversion, timestamp     2013-01-19 09:04:17

  "Simplicity" is not a simple concept

I've come to avoid using the word "Simplicity" or its variants ("Simple," &c.) It means too many different things to different people.For example, my original land-line phone was simple:It's simple by eliminating extraneous use cases. It only handles one user scenario, the one that was the most common when it was invented. If we think of the number of affordances and the number of uses, this kind of simplicity lowers the number of affordances by lowering the number of uses. I call this kind ...

   Simplicity,Software,Usability,iPhone,Phone     2011-11-24 09:21:09

  Is Java the platform of the future?

I've mentioned before, but I think we are living in a period of time where a bigger explosion of programming languages is occurring than at any time in the past four decades. Having lived through a number of the classic languages such as BASIC, Simula, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, C, C++ and Java, I can understand why people are fascinated with developing new ones: whether it's compiled versus interpreted, procedural versus functional, languages optimised for web development or embedded devices,...

   Java,Platform,Future     2012-04-03 12:59:52

  Emacs adventures

I have been using Emacs for over a year now. I actually didn’t learn a lot when I started using it (just the basics to get going and then some relatively common keyboard shortcuts), but lately I have been reading and learning much more about it. I’m so grateful by everything I’ve learned from different people on the net that I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve learned, and a simple major mode for editing AsciiDoc documents. As a long-time VIM user, I f...

   Editor,Linux,Emacx,VIM,Shortcuts     2011-11-30 11:56:49

  Why Python is important for you

I believe that Python is important for software development. While there are more powerful languages (e.g. Lisp), faster languages (e.g. C), more used languages (e.g. Java), and weirder languages (e.g. Haskell), Python gets a lot of different things right, and right in a combination that no other language I know of has done so far. It recognises that you’ll spend a lot more time reading code than writing it, and focuses on guiding developers to write readable code. It’s possible to...

   Python,Importance,Paradigm     2012-02-12 04:49:09

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