Skip to main content

Coding Horror: The PHP Singularity

Media_httpwwwcodingho_fldkj

A good take on the ghoulery of PHP. It's a fairly extreme viewpoint as there are plenty of people making good products from PHP and that's what the real result should be, not just good quality code bases (although the two depend on each other after a couple of iterations of development).

The real problem is people. You could invent a new programming language, one to rule them all... but there will always be crap programmers. People who don't care that much about it, just do a bit on the side, work for themselves and just lay little bad eggs for multiple customers and move on. There are still people I have spoken to *very* recently that were arguing against design patters / OO programming and other fundamentals. You won't escape that. The answer is to chill out about it. The more crap programmers, the better you will look and the more it will keep you in work sorting out their mess.

So really what I am saying is "Thank you crap programmers" :-)

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Creating star ratings in HTML and Javascript

I'd searched around a little for some shortcuts to help in doing this but I couldn't find anything satisfactory that included the ability to pull the rating off again for saving. I'd ended up coming up with this rather cheeky solution. Hopefully it helps you too! This is my first post in a while (I stopped blogging properly about 8 years ago!) It's strange coming back to it. Blogger feels very crusty and old by todays standards too.

Make your objects immutable by default

More about the Good Dojo In my post last week , I discussed creating objects that are instantiated safely. Please go back and read if you are interested. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I'd also written the class so it was immutable when instantiated. This is important!!! I feel like a broken record in repeating this but I am sure at the time of writing your code, you aren't modifying your object all over the place and so are safe in the belief that protecting against mutability is overkill. Please remember though, your code could be around for a hell of a long time. You aren't writing your code for now... you are writing for the next fool that comes along (including you) . Nothing is more upsetting that coming back to fix a bug on some wonderfully crafted code to say "Who has butchered my code?!", but often you were involved at the start of the process. You made the code easy to modify, allowing objects to be used / reused / modified without thi

An instantiated object should be "ok"

I've been QA'ing quite a bit of work recently and one common theme I've noticed across both Java and C# projects I have been looking at is that we occasionally open ourselves up unessacarily to Exceptions by the way objects are being created. My general rule of thumb (which I have seen mentioned in a Pluralsight video recently but also always re-iterate in various Robust Software talks I have done) is that you shouldn't be able to create an object and then call a method or access a property that then throws an exception. At worst, it should return null (I'm not going to moan about that now). I've created an example below. We have two Dojos, one is good and one is bad. The bad dojo looks very familiar though. It's a little class written in the style that seems often encouraged. In fact, many classes start life as something like this. Then as years go on, you and other colleagues add more features to the class and it's instantiation becomes a second