The This Aint News Development Blog

But its not perls fault….

its mine, I suppose. No scratch that, its PHP’s fault. Damn it too hell indeed! So let me fill you in on some back story.

Once upon a time, about a year back, I was all unemployed and that, and wanted to do some kind of career change, from nothing (previously call centre/builder/bar staff) to something that paid pretty well, so I figured web developers get a lot of money, and theres a lot of room for promotion etc. Now, already possesing all the programming skillz known to man, I figured this would be easy enough.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, not knowing much about this web dev lark, I settled on php, mostly because I thought it was the language to do this, after all perl was well and truley dead at this point [sic] (btw, I have no idea what this sic means, I just figured it makes me look clever!). Any way, I wrote some codez, was pretty damn easy tbh, I had shit up and running faster than something very fast.

A month down the line I had that all sorted and needed to put my new found skillz to good use, so I started making This Aint News – Social News for pirates

Anyway, I soon found out that php has some seriously bad programming techniques, such as jibbing everything into the index.php and letting it do all the magic. I figured this was cool, since it ran lightning fast, but I soon figured out this was pretty unmaintainable, so a few rewrites later I had something nice(ish).

So this was about 9months into me being dole scum, and I finally got a job, mostly I think coz I put the effort into making TAN however this job was perl based, and me having never used perl, I was all like, wow, this perl thing sucks.

Fast forward again a whole year, catalyst is beggining to look real nice, and I mean real nice, but slow. My current code was getting pretty hacky, so I decided once again I’d rewrite it, this time using MVC and a catalyst inspired design, needless to say it was epic, probably the best peice of php anyone anywhere had ever written – ever! Only it had a few issues, being of a catalyst inspired design, it was objecty, very very objecty. And as we all know, php has no concept of long running web apps.  However, I continued, and got right near the end of the final rewrite, only to discover there was no way this code was gonna run fast, since it had to initialise all the objects on each page request.

At this point I figured fuck it, I’ll remake the bastard in catalyst, it wont take too long, the code is pretty similar, its aware of all the cat stlye concepts (stash, flash, c (called f) etc).

Now this blog is coming to an end, I can get to the point I was trying to make, now I have to convert all this perfect php code to perl code, and I don’t want to, it just feels like I’m doing the same work once again, and theres no joy in it.

So to put it simply, I’m blaming everyone else, especially php, and perl for not having phps syntax/functions/object system

SAFE (btw, written, but not read)

p.s. template toolkit sucks, when it compiles the templates, it should compile each template into a super compiled template, not just convert the templates into perl and include the sub-templates  at run time, but thats a blog for another time.