programming language obsession makes you look stupid

It appears that many people seem to have too much of their life wrapped up in a particular programming language. You only need to look over at dZone, Reddit or Digg to see this fandom in all its glory. All too often we find articles about why such and such a programming language sucks. However, just because a language sucks for one (or a couple) of particular reasons, it doesn’t mean it is not useful in general. It’s like me saying computers suck because they crash. However, just because my computer crashes from time to time doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

I just find the whole religious aspect to a language rather pathetic. The result often leads to the inappropriate choice of language for development of an application, simply because the individual’s voice that is heard the loudest makes the decision. Ok, if any language will do then just go with whatever you are comfortable with, but stop yourself bitching about other people’s choice of language.

For example, the number of times you hear people saying dynamic languages are no use, for a plethora of reasons, is stunning. You would think that no one had ever developed anything of reasonable size and scale in these languages. It’s not as if most of the largest websites on this planet have not been written in PHP/Python/Ruby, yet you still read articles where people are saying where such a feat is likely to lead to catastrophe. Stop doing this it makes you look stupid.

The same can be said for those that diss Java. OK, I think it’s possibly a poor choice for those considering a startup web business (basically if you are going to be considering shared hosting Java as an option on this platform is nonexistent), but there are many places where the use of existing libraries written in Java make it the ideal choice for an application. An example of this can be seen in what I’m currently working on, which is an application that uses constraint programming techniques. There are a few such libraries in other languages but the most mature and feature rich (and free) are in Java so sense dictates you use Java.

Essentially my bug bear boils down to people choosing a language for the wrong reasons, more often than not due to blind faith rather than education. Don’t just use a language because it is popular, use it because it best fits the job needing done. Popularity can come into it though, because at the end of the day you might wish to tap into a large set of existing programmers, or you may want to attract the brightest young talent who want to work in what’s popular/new. Just don’t let it be the only thing that dictates your choice.

Unfortunately, regardless of however many blog post or articles people read and write, I feel that we are never going to remove this inherent language evangelism. Maybe the industry would be in a far better position if we were all language agnostic. Can you imagine how much more work would get done if people spent the first two months of a project actually doing work rather than arguing about what language it should all be written in.

perl is dead, long live…perl?

When I started writing this article it was going to be about the choice of language people use when they create a quick dirty script for say a one off task. For this type of thing I tend to find myself using Perl and since I thought Perl was maybe a little old in the tooth, I wondered what the “cool kids” were using these days. However, this got me thinking more about the benefits of such scripts both to the programmer and their employer.

Often I find myself needing to process/generate a file in some way. To do this kind of task I feel that Java, C#, C++ etc are just waaaay too heavyweight for the task – my default reaction is that you need an interpreted language. For me this is Perl. I know PHP pretty well but it just never enters my head to use it for a command-line task, Python I kind of know but not very well, and Ruby again I just don’t know well enough, but would probably only consider this an option for a web app like PHP – no reason why I only see Ruby and PHP as web app not command-line options. So what do people use for this kind of stuff? I’m interested.

Anyway, this line of thought led me to the following observation: writing small scripts to do simple file manipulation/generation and system tasks makes you a better programmer. Even if the task you are trying to complete seems small and probably a one off, I say “write a script”. Why?

First, this may give you the opportunity to stray away from the heavyweights like Java that I mentioned above, and learn something new (the more you know the better programmer you are. Right?). Your boss may not like the idea, but the thing you are doing is work related so you can tell him it will save time, which I promise you in the long run it will. Even if you find you run the script only once you will find the learning process will have stood you in good stead.

Second, it’s an ideal way to break the monotony of your everyday work cycle. You may have been working on a particular project for months and, as happens, you are beginning to hate the thought of even looking at the code never mind write more of it. So, if you think of a script that will help you in some way in your day to day work, and will benefit both you and the company, then write it. Not only does it break the monotony but when you finish it there is also a sense of achievement that you feel by actually completing something. This sense of purpose is then reflected back into the main project; I mean you want that sense of achievement again. Right? So everyone wins.

Third, well surely the above two are more than enough reason to do it. If not tell me some more 🙂 . You can always turn the little script writing into a competition within your work, i.e. who can come up with the best/most useful script! Don’t worry about finding these types of scripts to write – I generally think of a couple everyday. Just look around you and you will be amazed at what you will find.

Over and out.

being dynamic is overrated

I was going to post about a little problem that I experienced while undertaking a project I’m involved with but canned it thinking it was of limited interest. That was, however, until I made the same mistake again yesterday, so I thought I would document it to save my own sanity, even if there is no-one else who cares – not that anyone reads this anyway.

So to my faux pas, and believe it or not this cost me a few hours! The problem: well as part of my project (a bike shop website for those who really want to know – www.cyclewize.com) I’m programming in PHP using cakePHP. The advantages/disadvantages of PHP can be debated from dusk till dawn if that is your thing – just remember though, while you are debating all those smart people are just getting on with doing stuff. That said, my problem was, in a sense, due to the use of PHP or dynamic languages in particular.

Anyway, back on track, so the component I was working on simply uploads a set of photos and scales them accordingly. Simple as that. The problem that I kept seeing was that although the photographs were being uploaded ok, i.e no errors were being reported, I was unable to copy the files from their temporary directory over to their new home. Since no errors were being returned I was stuck as to what was happening. I battled away putting print_r’s in here there and everywhere to no avail. Then I just happened to check my call to move_uploaded_file. On inspection, I noticed I had a slight misspelling of a variable name in one of the functions arguments, thus only at that point did the variable come into existence. Therefore what was getting passed to the function was the empty string and hence move_uploaded_file could not copy the file – you would have thought it should have raised an error but no. However, as it turns out, even if it had raised an error it wouldn’t have helped me much. Why? Because straight after the call to move_uploaded_file I was doing a redirect to a new page. Therefore, any errors related to the problem http request were output to a screen which flashed by too quickly for me to notice.

So what is the root of this problem? Well if I was using a complied language it is likely that the compiler would have warned me that the variable I was passing to move_uploaded_file was either not declared or at least never been initialised. I’m pretty sure that a warning message would have been output (which I missed) by PHP’s interpreter but this is no substitute for a compile-time message. As much as I love the freedom of dynamic languages you have to be aware of this significant drawback, and people can go on about how this stuff gets picked up through thorough testing but I’m not sure that’s good enough. Also, the page redirect was a killer, as it made me miss all the output messages. It’s probably worth while not performing redirects if you find something isn’t working, just to ensure that you are seeing all the messages output by the interpreter (you can always switch it back on later). Finally, some sort of lint check should have picked this up. So from now on I think I will be running things through php –l to check that my syntax is good.

There you have it, a nice root cause analysis! I probably missed out the fact that it was my rather inane programming that was the main problem, but bugger it, I’m not really into damaging my ego.