NYCPHP Meetup

[max goldberg]

Well I think you said what I was trying to say a bit better.
I'm not really hard on people for using a " on a static string
rather than a ', but I would like to know they actually know
the difference in how they are parsed. I just feel like more senior
developers do write better code, not only does it work, but it takes
into account a great deal of future expansion, it is usually well 
documented and there is usually a lot of good forethought put into it.

A long while ago at a job I was forced into a bunch of standards by the 
lead developer, which at the time I hated. I didn't see any use for them 
until I got a new job, and was forced to fix an amazing amount of really 
unorganized hacks. At this point I fully understood the need for fully 
commented, peer evaluated code that fit a style guide. Also at this job
the lead developer ignored a good amount of my questions, causing me to 
seek out the answer on my own, via documentation or trial and error.

I think it helped me greatly. I wish some of the people I worked with 
had the initiative to teach themselves some things without needing to 
have someone walk them through the most basic parse errors.

I don't think that document has many uses from a professional 
standpoint, but I did understand his frustration and I did find the 
humor in it, regardless of if I agree with all of his points. =)

-max

Adam Fields wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:55:22AM -0500, max goldberg wrote:
> [...]
> 
>>I think to truly be qualified you need to understand many things beyond
>>syntax, which most people don't get. It seems no one even writes code
>>for high performance and low resource usage any more. Everyone needs 
>>their hand held through the most basic of exercises. I'm not sure if 
>>it's just my opinion and current situation, it just seems like a lot
>>of people who make a living of programming/scripting web applications
>>have absolutely no idea what they are doing.
> 
> 
> You make a number of assertions here, which are not necessarily
> related:
> 
> 1) People write inefficient code.
> 
> Yes, that's true. But high-performance/low resource usage isn't always
> the best thing. What if making your code highly tuned takes you three
> times as long and makes the code completely incomprehensible to anyone
> who comes along after you? Like everything else, efficiency is a
> trade-off for other things. The problem isn't that people write
> inefficient code, it's that they don't know the difference. Much of
> "web scripting" is written in a RAD environment and should be written
> in such a way that it's fast to code, fast to replace when the
> functionality changes, and easy to read. This is not to say that
> efficiency should be ignored, but making every last component perform
> at its optimum is probably a waste of valuable developer time that
> could be better spent on other things (such as writing better comments
> and documentation).
> 
> 2) People don't know what they're doing.
> 
> There is a difference between a junior developer and a senior
> architect. Similarly, there's a difference between somone who picked
> up the PHP-in-24 hours book last week and someone who's deployed
> dozens of successful projects. If you're hiring, and you don't know
> the difference, your project isn't going to succeed if you're doing
> anything remotely complicated. Junior developers have a valuable place
> on a development team, but when they're in charge of the development
> effort (or solo), it's only natural that their lack of experience is
> going to show up in the final product.
> 
> 
>>I read a good rant which made a lot of sense to me at
>>http://m.bacarella.com/papers/secsoft/html/
> 
> 
> There are some good points there, certainly, although most of that is
> aimed at admins and systems programmers. A lot of it is just
> frustrated ranting that is amusing but not productive.
>