Building a better Programmer

Spend 2 minutes on Google, and I’m sure you can have a bunch of PHP is better than Ruby and visa-versa. That’s not why I’m posting this. This article doesn’t interest me because it is Ruby vs. PHP, nor does his use of cursing appeal to me all that much. What I like about it are the lessons the author provides.

Look at that old cruddy PHP code you worked on two years ago. You know what I’m talking about. Seriously, it’s only cruddy because you are two years wiser–two years more experienced. The site is still up–still maintainible.

Now, go learn Ruby and Rails…go learn .NET, J2EE or who knows what else. When you come back to PHP (and you will ;-)) you are going to crank out the meanest, slickest, hottest code you ever wrote.

That’s the lesson I liked so much: Never stop learning new ways to make the best tool for the job even better.

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

626 thoughts on “Building a better Programmer

  1. Re: Building a better Programmer
    I’m always amazed how quickly a language debate turns into a flamewar. In this case though, I think the author was provoking it. After all, why did he post this article to [url=http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/]O’Reilly Ruby[/url] instead of [url=http://www.oreillynet.com/php/]O’Reilly PHP[/url]? Also, he never actually gave any specific points about what Ruby couldn’t do. Besides, if one language is good at something, it doesn’t mean any other language is worse – just different. In light of all this, I have a language joke for you (natural language that is):

    Two Hungarian policeman are standing at a street corner in Budapest. An American walks up and asks, “Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to the Parliament Building?” The Hungarians don’t understand and when they don’t respond, the American proceeds to try some other languages, “Parlez-vous francais? Vui govorite po-russki? Apko Hindi aati? Sprechen sie deutsch?” He goes on and on but the Hungarians just stare at him blankly. Finally, the American gives up and wanders off. One of the policeman turns to the other and asks, “Hey, don’t you think we should learn some other languages?” “Why?” the other man responds, “It didn’t do him any good.”

    I actually stumbled across this article earlier and since my comment is buried I reposted it on my [url=http://netahead.info/]website[/url].

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