Category Archives: Software

sad day for open-source

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It’s a very sad day when the open-source community is forced to take a highly-successful, visible, driving project like Firefox and change its name to something like Iceweasel. By changing the name we lose invaluable branding and popularity for the Debian and other distributions that choose to make this distinction. This sort of decision is equivalent to a 3 year regression for Linux.

The name Iceweasel sounds like the odd name of an infant open-source project. Many people give up on Linux read names like Iceweasel and GIMP.

don’t eat paste (learning PHP part iii)

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Hi, David. This is an interesting approach, but I think it’s a solution to a slightly different problem than teaching someone PHP. Instead, it’s a solution to teaching someone the basics of building a web app and you just happen to use PHP to teach those concepts. A perfectly worthwhile and desirable goal, but different.
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David Sklar

I agree and disagree with some of the points Sklar (sorry, two David’s makes this confusing) goes on to make. If I may paraphrase, Sklar is raising a point which competes with that raised by Ben in our initial discussion. My initial suggestion in the discussion with Ben indicated that books should start by teaching PHP on the command-line and slowly build up to constructing a very lightweight MVC framework and example application. One of Ben’s chief, and valid, concerns equated selling books about PHP with convincing readers or page-flippers that the book would teach them to build web pages in the first few chapters. Or that individuals might be turned off if they weren’t creating XSS attacks willy-nilly by chapter 3. I think the counter to this that Sklar raised is that by hiding the framework you turn off the people who don’t feel they’re really getting their feet wet with PHP. They feel that by using your framework they aren’t learning the ‘real guts’ of the language.

This clearly relates directly to some of the arguments Sklar makes that other languages face this challenge as well, but PHP perhaps more so than others. PHP digs its own hole here because unlike a .NET, Java, or a ColdFusion, PHP has built its name on easy to learn and get going. You can pay $4.99/month and get a server running PHP in 10 minutes. Writing an application in any of these other platforms can take orders of magnitude longer to setup, there’s an expectation of barrier to entry for learning, and often you have to buy pieces of it like an IDE. Sklar indicates that it’s important to strike the balance between “a way to do things” and “the way to do things”.

The dilemma lies in choosing whether I ask the reader to take on faith that the framework underlying the first half of the book isn’t worth delving into right now, but is worth understanding later and either using the quick framework or garner enough knowledge of the principles to build your own. Or, do I go back to my original plan of introducing PHP on the command-line as we built up a small framework and graduate up to a web page far later in the book.

I have full confidence that either approach might work. I know universities teach Physics both with and without calculus to which I’m sure the physics professors initially said “you can’t teach physics without calculus, it’s heresy!” But, this day in age there’s only one physics. I know my economics professor told me she didn’t like math, but she managed to teach a great class about economics concepts by moving lines back and forth on graphs.

[tags]learning php, programming, computer science, php, php books[/tags]

PHP Appalachia

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Brian and I went to PHP Appalachia this Wednesday and Thursday. Different from a traditional conference, the Cherokee, NC KOA served as the main venue for PHP Appalachia. The two of us stayed in a Kabin with a full bed and a set of bunks. All of us hiked, chatted, and met with the other attendees until we left mid-day on Thursday.

We sat around the fire on Wednesday night chatting about PHP when Ben Ramsey and I entered an interesting discussion about PHP’s future and how to introduce newbies to PHP.

I’ll define the sterotype which serves as the premise for this discussion. Most books that introduce PHP, even those which rely on previous programming knowledge begin with an example like this: [code lang="php"]print "hello world";[/code] This example will be soon followed within the next 1-3 chapters (sometimes after, sometimes before introducing loops, conditions, and other basic language constructs of PHP) by an example like this: [code lang="php"]print $_GET['foo'];[/code] In any/all books it’s far later in the book where Object-Oriented programming is covered. In the coverage of creating forms, handling GET/POST/Cookies/Session there’s relatively little talk of security, escaping, or encodings.

The long and short is that people learn PHP in a way that first teaches them to design web applications in a poorly maintainable, insecure, and generally poor method. With the advent frameworks like the Zend Framework and other MVC-based libraries there’s no need to teach bad habits that result in a bad name for PHP.

[tags]php, books, rant[/tags]