I recently needed to capture the version of OSX components (application, bundle, quicktime components) via the commandline as part of some administration infrastructure I was building. After doing some research and experimentation, I came to the conclusion that it could best be built using PlistBuddy.
Here is the script that I built. I hope you find it as useful as I have:
https://gist.github.com/660130
The purpose of this post is not simply to bash PHP, but rather to express what I see as severe shortcomings in the PHP language. Ultimately, I’d like to make an argument for a fork of PHP as a way to resolve these shortcomings and it a better language for everyone. Because it would be impossible to make my changes without a completely new project and the final result wouldn’t look much like the PHP that people know and love/hate today, it would need to be a “new” language.
This should be a multi-part series (at least 3 parts) which I will write whenever I have some time and motivation to crank out these ideas.
Before I begin, I’d like to share my background a little bit. I’ve been writing code off and on since I took my first programming class in 6th grade. This class taught BASIC on PCjr machines and, at the time, I had fun doing it but didn’t fully grasp what I learned until 2 or 3 years later when I discovered QBasic on a machine at my dad’s job and I had an idea for how I could write a program to animate a ball bouncing around the screen. From that point on, I was writing a significant amount of code and tearing through programming languages first with REALBasic (then, called CrossBasic or XBasic), to C, then C++, then PERL, ObjC, PHP, BASH, Python, Ruby…… and on and on.
Much in the same regard that I’m pretty much a programming language slut, I’m also an operating system slut. I love seeing how OS’s do things differently and all this diversity has given me, what I consider to be, a pretty decent perspective on good, better and best ways of doing things.
Jumping between these languages, I’ve seen all the various -isms that each language attempts to steer you into. I’ve seen languages go out of their way to make things easier for the developer or easier for the compiler. This leads me to my first section.
The first, very wrong thing that jumped out at me early in my PHP learning process was that, off the bat, it encourages developers to mix their business logic with their view code. PHP was designed, from day one, to be embedded in HTML.
I understand that this was done for the express reason of lowering the barrier to entry and enabling users to build dynamic web content with minimal effort. This is a great idea, and I’m not faulting the original PHP developers for it, but I feel that it is a bad move to make that part of the core language. If a developer is creating some code that they want to share between projects, whether that code will be used for web content or a commandline script or whatever, they must wrap their code in start and end tags (<?php //code… ?>).
Since the majority of the code that I write is stuff that runs on the commandline, I find it a little annoying to always need to wrap my code in these tags. When creating a web application, especially when using MVC design concepts, the only code that should use embedding is the view code. The rest of the app should both be non-web-accessible and also be nothing but code.
Of course, when running things on the commandline or using CGI (with nginx, for instance), you can configure it to use the ‘-r’ switch to disable the requirement of said tags, but when using mod_php in apache (as is most often the case), this is not an easy task. Also, if you’re mixing files that contain start/end tags with files that do not, it can get hairy, especially if you forget to use the switch.
PHP should have a built-in method for automatically detecting that a file should be treated as raw sourcecode vs embedded code. The most obvious solution would be the use of different file extensions. Personally, I’d choose ‘phpe’ for files with start/end tags and just ‘php’ for raw php source. I don’t believe that affects the difficulty for beginner users in any way and also hints that there is a time and a place for each type of file.
This concludes Part 1. If you’ve got any corrections, you can post in the comments or contact me. Contact info is available on my website (http://spike.grobste.in).
I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the current broadband offerings provided by nearly all of the ISPs in the area. Although they place a lot of restrictions on their users, the most annoying restriction that I’ve encountered from my own provider (TimeWarner’s RoadRunner cable internet service) is that, even with their “Turbo” package, their upstream throughput is horrific.
Whenever I go to a friend’s place with my laptop, one of the first things I do is check out speedtest.net and see what kind of speeds they’re given. At home, I typically see approximately 30Mbit/0.5Mbit (down/up). While the downstream throughput is FANTASTIC, the upstream is embarrassing. Most “competing” services provide 1/3 of the downstream in exchange for 4 to 6 times the upstream.
I quote “competing” because in this area, there is little, if any, overlap between consumer broadband internet providers. Frequently, you’re left with one option: whichever company services your area. I can’t get FiOS here. I can’t get Speakeasy. I could get business broadband, but I don’t want to spend > $200/month.
The upstream throughput on the consumer offering from TimeWarner is embarrassing. Let me put this into perspective.
Last summer, I went to Ireland and, having just purchased a new Samsung 14.7MP digital camera, proceeded to take a LOT of pictures. Between my camera (whose battery kept dying) and my iphone, I took around 1200 pictures. Once I got home, I spent days going through the photos, deleting duplicates and any blurry pictures or ones with bad lighting. My plan thereafter was to upload them to Flickr. It took me nearly 8 days to get them uploaded to the site and during that time, I was mostly unable to function in my normal digital world. The upstream to my internet connection was completely saturated during this time which was causing severe slowdowns to my downstream throughput. My 360 was unable to remain connected to Live, netflix would only stream in the lowest quality possible and Youtube would take forever to load videos. I could barely do anything except read slashdot and chat on AIM.
Back when broadband internet connections were new, only more technical people got on that. Less techie users stuck with AOL or whatever dialup service they had and the geeks out there would saturate their broadband connections by distributing music and video; it was a heaven for the media hungry minority and they were blamed for all kinds of issues that remain today.
Today, everyone is uploading media to Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, myspace, YouTube, etc etc etc. It’s not uncommon for a normal user to upload 500MB of their own content to some website. It’s not uncommon for a normal user to own a camera or even a cellphone that takes multi megabyte photos. Cable companies (especially TimeWarner) need to realize this and provide an acceptable service to their users.
Heavy users are not pirates anymore and the industry needs to stop treating us like we are.