| Reading and Writing Spreadsheets with PHP When it comes to playing nice with data in different formats, PHP’s pedigree is hard to beat. Not only does the language make it a breeze to deal with SQL resultsets and XML files, but it comes with extensions to deal with formats as diverse as... |
| Code's Worse Enemy |
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Steve Yegge talks about choosing the right programming language in the face of Code's Worse Enemy:
I'll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code. There's a lot of truth in what he says. You can't fault his taste: He prefers Mozilla Rhino, a Javascript/Ecmascript implementation.
When we coded in ASP, we were a JScript shop. When we were looking for something that ran cross-platform, the closest thing that fit the bill was PHP. Javascript with perl-style $variables. Neither language is perfect. But good enough - or as some prefer to put it: worse is better. |
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