I get all my work done in PHP and Javascript, and my serious programming kicks come from javascript at this point.

I’ve looked into Ruby on Rails, and if you want to talk about “spend my time on the fun, challenging parts of the work rather than mucking around with crap”, that’s exactly what learning rails and deploying it and working with it in general felt like to me – mucking around instead of getting things done. I don’t like frameworks where I don’t know what all of the code is doing. For instance, I was looking at ‘The Rails Way’ and a note mentioned that, to paraphrase, the routing code has been so convoluted that for a long time only one person could change that section of the source, and ‘most developers still don’t understand’ the routing. But ‘you don’t need to’. Wow, that sounds great.

Ruby seems cool, though. I’d consider writing a site in erb. I don’t really think MVC is appropriate for web applications. I’m going to check out django and turbogears, I guess.

I think, though, knowing enough about PHP and Javascript and seeing that Ruby and Python aren’t much different, my quest to expand my programming methods is leading to strange languages like Haskell. Now THAT’s different.

Required reading: http://terrychay.com/blog/article/php-ruby-evil-good.shtml

I understand that at this point there will be a pile of old school, die-hard PHP geeks shaking their heads and saying “Hasn’t he heard of Cake or …”

Die-hard PHP geeks don’t have time for your rants.

I’ve been programming for just about 30 years and I’ve learned more languages than I care to remember. I know some Python but I would still never choose it for a front end. Most languages suck and there’s almost nothing that improved my skills by half of them. All I care about is what’s going to make me the most money and be fun. Python isn’t fun for me.

We all get out of the business eventually, gotta think diversification of income. I got out of being an employee for about 6 years then I got bored and threw a resume out there asking for a ridiculous sum and darned if they didn’t beat it. So, right now PHP makes me money and I made a commitment so I can’t leave just yet.

See at some point in your career, if you’re diligent and follow a plan, you’ll have broad experience and be a master at one or just a few skills. I’ve been in management at a fortune 500 company, 6 different kind of engineers (h/w and s/w), worked with customers, production and engineering and also run a couple side businesses. My only point is that this broad experience has helped me more than being good at PERL, PHP, (definitely VB), C++ or anything else.

You know how it goes. When you’re just starting out people tell you to learn it all. You buy into the job postings that want you to be a master at 10 different languages, 3 different databases, you can fly and work 80 hour weeks and they’ll pay you a measly 5 figure salary. That’s total B.S. Many of us have been there done that. It will take time to understand that’s not how you get ahead and be seen by the industry as a highly valued scarce resource. Supply and demand rules and patience is rewarded. Maybe telling you will help you understand but most likely you’ll just have to figure it out yourself 10-20 years from now.

We should be proud if we don’t just focus on learning as many languages or functions as we can because it lets us focus more on business, marketing and distribution. You know, the rest of the skills a successful company needs other than just Engineering. Engineers are everywhere. People who understand niche skills and broader skills are much harder to find.

Not sure why someone would think Python isn’t dominated by PHP but I suppose they would have the numbers to back up that suggestion. So I still agree with the author.

Good luck in all that you do. Cheers.

From my side, a MVC PHP framework, like CodeIgniter, it’s way more simple and a natural approach to develop a web application.

And, just like a detail, having identation instead of curly braces it maked difficult to see “for” loops or “if” conditions, especially when they contain a long code.