Dev-Picayune

I was reading Brandon’s blog tonight to get to the Steve Yegge article on Interviewing Ruby Programmers. And honestly, after reading Yegge’s article, especially the interview questions, I have to admit that I feel like a real hack. Not the good kind of hack (hacker) in terms of the guru that everyone looks to. I feel like a hapless programmer who barely keeps his head above water. I tried to imagine answering the questions for Python instead of Ruby and honestly couldn’t do much with it. Yes, I can pick it apart a bit and I can compare it to other languages. I’ve taught others (or at least gotten them started) on Python. But there are still tons of things I don’t understand. And it seems like there is an endless waterfall of information and complexity and no matter how hard I try, I can’t even swim upstream to get to anywhere near the waterfall. I am so distracted by the everyday tasks of work and home life that I don’t see how I will ever “catch up” if that’s even a possible task. But then again, that’s what “picayune” is all about – small, trivial, of little importance.

Technorati Tags: python, ruby, programming

In what can only be viewed as a minor set back, I had to reconfigure both sites back to PHP4 from PHP5. Why? Well, because as it turns out, PHP5 definitely has a strong push for deprecating call-time pass-by-references. Now without getting into too much detail, I have say that I am serious annoyed with PHP. This is the second thing that has bit me trying to move to PHP5. The first problem was with XSLT and Sablotron no longer being the standard way of transforming XML and now this. This latest problem messes up the XMLRPC library that I am using for blogging tool interfaces to the blogs. Keith Devens (the author of the original library that I modified slightly) commented on the problem in 2003.

I hate PHP… just hate it. Hate it hate it hate it.

I’m guessing he doesn’t like it. Not surprisingly, Keith is a fan of Python. This just makes me wonder if PHP5 will ever gain any serious acceptance at this rate. There is just so much PHP4 code out there and so much of it broken by PHP5.

I emailed Keith about the situation and he’s still not sure about the timing of the next version or exactly what will be supported. At this point, I am going to stay with PHP4. I will say that PHP5 is supposed to have a switch for turning on the call-time pass-by-reference support. But I have been unable to activate that change in my .htaccess file with the hosting provider. On my Ubuntu laptop, I have it all working fine on PHP5 but that’s because of the option being set. So the Pumpkinvine blogging system will remain workable for both PHP4 and PHP5 but only with call-time pass-by-reference turned on.

Technorati Tags: PHP, XMLRPC, Pumpkinvine, XML, XSLT