[SGVLUG] PHP question

[Cheryl Johnson]

I love this discussion, even in my cluelessness.

 "as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of 
regeneration."
 That is such a good quote--- and reminds me of the crappy education I got. 
I still cannot learn metric, or centigrade, even though it seems the more 
logical way to measure, because I was taught inches/feet/miles/Fahrenheit 
etc. I try to avoid clutter in my brain nowadays by researching all opinions 
of something before I start learning it.
About the child and Montessori school, I know nothing about kids, but some 
schools apparently have underlying agendas. I came across info lately which 
I was disappointed to hear because I really like Will Smith & his family. 
Googling them, I found a bunch of stories like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Village_Leadership_Academy
and I was thinking how difficult it is to be a parent these days.
As far as the failures of computer programming concepts go, I wrote down a 
quote from PBS TV that I cannot find an author to, I think it goes like 
this:
"the true measure of all our intentions is how long the good in them 
lasts" -and it reminded me of this discussion.
Cheri



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dustin Laurence" <dllaurence at dslextreme.com>
To: <sgvlug at sgvlug.net>
Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2016 12:03 PM
Subject: Re: [SGVLUG] PHP question


> On 02/23/2016 10:48 AM, Henry B (Hank) Hotz, CISSP wrote:
>
>> I did use PHP 1-2 a bit a long time ago. So, please, it’s just a
>> language. Why is everyone so down on PHP?
>
> That's a lengthy rant I have no interest in writing up anytime soon.
> Also, my therapist says I'm coming along nicely suppressing the memories
> of the details of PHP, and I'd hate to undo all that hard-wone progress. 
> :-)
>
> In this vein, there is an interesting essay by Dijkstra:
>
> http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html
>
> which is good food for thought even though I don't agree with every
> single point in it.  PHP didn't exist at the time, or it would
> undoubtedly have attracted some pithy abuse from Dijkstra.  But one
> facet of the point of the essay is that criticizing the language that
> someone first learned programming in is like criticizing their mother,
> and receives similar responses.  So to reduce the howls of anger from
> those with lingering PHP affection, I'll use an analogy that takes aim
> at myself.  The essay contains the quote
>
> "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that
> have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are
> mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
>
> That bothered me once, because 8-bit basic brought me to programming
> (along with 6502 assembly).  But I'm a grown up programmer now and I can
> distinguish between feelings and truth, and the truth is that Dijkstra
> was correct.  For example, basic didn't have any abstraction facilities
> to speak of, and so it taught one to program without using arguably the
> single most important programming concept.  That's objectively bad for
> baby programmers.  It's not so different from growing up and learning
> the difference between lingering affection for your old girlfriend and
> the memories of good times and the realization that she was downright
> crazy and about the worst thing in the world for your emotional 
> development.
>
> PHP has similar problems, but as Dijkstra says, feelings get hurt when
> you say so.
>
>> From my viewpoint, the more extensive the functionality of a language
>> the longer the learning curve.
>
> Makes perfect sense, but it just turns out that the world doesn't
> actually work that way.  In practice there is enormous variation because
> there are so many ways to provide similar functionality.  Some syntactic
> choices and some semantic choices are much, much harder to learn to use
> correctly for the same payoff than others.  It's important to know that
> when choosing languages to learn, particularly if you're not grown up as
> a programmer yet.  A few examples.
>
> Python, for example, seems to be particularly efficient in programmer's
> learning time; I found I could program in it fairly well before I even
> learned anything about it explicitly.  Guido isn't an awesome C hacker
> (GIL, I'm looking at you), but in the words of a friend he IS awesome at
> standing on the principle of consistency.  It seems to be a good place
> to grow because you waste less time learning syntactic oddities and it
> has relatively few horrors and bad habits, even though it is not a
> minimalist language and has a lot of functionality.  I would prefer
> people get comfortable in at least one statically typed language first,
> but for better or worst that's not how people are learning programming
> right now.
>
> C++, by contrast, is probably the hardest widely deployed current
> language to use well.  For example, it provides exceptions just like
> python does, so your reasoning would suggest that it will take similar
> amounts of time to learn to use exceptions in either language.  Nothing
> could be farther from the truth.  Python exceptions just work, with no
> subtle gotchas (that I remember) in their straightforward, consistent
> semantics.  C++ exceptions, by contrast, have some of the worst
> semantics you'll ever find as a consequence of forcing them to coexist
> with manual memory allocation, two things which are barely possible to
> do simultaneously.  An expert can use them, but the price is that you
> have to learn some skills that are unnecessary almost anywhere else,
> such as writing code (particularly constructors) that mutates state
> transactionally because it calls something that could throw even though
> your own code can't (and so exception handling invades your entire
> codebase, even where you aren't explicitly using them).  It's telling
> how many companies I've talked to that simply don't use exceptions in
> C++ at all, and I can't blame them.
>
> So no, feature count isn't a good measure of learning curve, even though
> I agree that logically you'd think it would be.  The devil is in the
> details (particularly in C++).
>
> Dustin
>
>
>