– This post is geared towards my non- or semi-programmer friends, based on a conversation I had with one of them the other day that I felt needed more clarification.
Before I begin, I will concede the point that “PHP Can Do Anything” before some friends threaten to hurt me. [php dynamic methods] I in fact have probably done more client work in PHP [mad props to code igniter] than any other programming language, but I’ve really enjoyed working with Rails since I made some small utilities about two years ago. I’ve had a lot of *very* boutique projects that were great in their time and place, but I decided to retire. Anywho, I have a very anti-fanboy stance on a lot of Objects that tend to inspire fanboy-ness (Apple, iPod, Rails, America) I think they are great, but don’t think everything else is shit and useless.
I think my brain works in such a way that I always liked to have access to what was going on – I wanted to see my options. When I first started writing C programs in 8th grade, I remember outputting the value of every variable at every point of the iteration, just to be able to see what was what, what methods I had access to, what my value was. Fast forward to first using and IDE and getting sweet auto-completion, and its the same thing when I read some API documentation. It’s good to know what methods you have access to so you know what you can do. Fast forward to ActiveRecord and dynamic finders. You mean I can just say find_by_pants_and_shoes and just because I have both “pants” and “shoes” fields in my database, you know what I’m talking about? Jamis Buck’s definitive explanation solidifed the concept for me and changed the way I think about programming.
I hope to be a HS Math and Computer Science teacher someday so I can be the person to teach kids about things like this and Proof by Induction, rather than dreadful things like Buggles.
In conclusion, I’m glad I could both spout meaningless paragraphs for a page (just like every high school teacher I hated) AND just write about how great I think Rails is (just like every Rails blogger I hate) I guess the takeaway is that
NoMethodError: undefined method `invoke_method_missing_for_problem_solving' for "love"
:String from (irb):397
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This Railscast on making a plugin is sweet too: http://railscasts.com/episodes/33
PHP
If you’re going to talk about me, you should talk a lot more about me. This post is seriously lacking a lot of me, and I think it shows.
Furthermore, I’d totally give you a snappy comeback if I remembered what the hell we were talking about that inspired this post. I can certainly be a bit (a lot) PHP-centric, since it’s what I know, but I think you realize that I’m in no way anti-Ruby. At least not now; I might have been on March 26th. I tend to change my mind frequently and dramatically. Either that or I was playing devil’s advocate, which I do any chance I get.
Personally, I’ve been wanting to get a crack at Ruby for a while now. My web host (1&1) recently added Ruby support to my server and I signed up with another host (mt) that also has it, so it’s looking like it may happen really soon.
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