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What's the dumbest reason you've learned a programming language?
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this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Programming
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"Gods, that's stupid. Why is it being done this way? Have they never heard of naming conventions? Is the language really that awfully designed?"
Learns PHP to find out more.
"Yup..."
HEY! Is PHP ugly? Yes. Does it use stupid naming conventions? Also yes! But it's an awesome language when you want to get shit done. There's no other languages out there where you can just write some code in VIM directly on the server through SSH and immediately see your results without any further setup. No frameworks required, no packages, no imports, no buzzwords and hubub, just pure unadulterated utility.
Incorrect. Perl does the same just as well, and it's a language that actually makes sense while also being uglier.
In my experience Perl is a write-only language. Coming in behind someone else and fixing or writing their code is often slower than just rewriting it
Perl is definitely a WORN language.
Write Once, Read Never
Perl is partially readable, provided that it's your own code. The one thing perl coders hate the most, is other people's code.
Source: Am a perl coder
I'll admit, I have zero experience with Pearl. I do like the uglier point you made though. 50+ DKP
Nonsense, there are tons of systems like that now. I've been playing with Deno & Fresh, it's great. Trivial to install, a pretty great language, Fresh doesn't force everything to be client side - you can easily write old school completely server side rendered sites if you want but you get to use TSX which is waaaaay superior to the old text based templating systems we used to use (Handlebars, Jinja, etc.).
It also has built in hot reloading by default so even faster than PHP. Literally hit save and you see the results.
What's this install nonsense? I just looked up Deno and it's part of an NPM stack. With PHP you just
Open an Apache server
Write code
???
Profit!
Accurate PHP mindset on so many levels
It's not. It supports NPM modules for backwards compatibility, but the whole point is that it doesn't inherit the NPM tooling mess. You can go from a new Linux install to a running Fresh project in 3 commands.
Okay, I'm interested. What stack is it part of? What kind of servers does it use?
There's two things:
Deno: this is a replacement for Node and NPM and prettier and some other tools. So one aspect is that it's a more modern Node, using standard web APIs instead of Node specific stuff. And the other aspect is it is more streamlined modern tooling - no node_modules, no complicated build steps, built in Typescript support, etc. In fact you can use a single file as a script, similar to Python.. but unlike Python you can use third party dependencies, which makes it fantastic for stuff like CI scripts, etc. where you might have suffered with Bash or Python before.
Fresh: this is just a web framework targeting Deno. Honestly I haven't used it much but I really like what I've seen so far. I always found React to be confusing and overkill for most sites, which should really be rendered server side, but also I really like the way you can compose components with JSX/TSX in a real language with full type checking. Fresh gives you both!
In what sense does python not have third party dependencies?
It has them, but you can't use them from a single-file script. You have to set up a
pyptoject.toml, create avenvand thenpip install .in it. Quite a lot of faff. It also makes some things like linting in CI way harder than they should be because the linters have to do all that too.With Deno a single
.tsfile can import third party dependencies (you can use any URL) and Deno itself will take care of downloading them and making them available to the script.Some other languages have this feature to certain degrees. E.g. I think F# can do it, and people are working on it for Rust, but Deno is at the forefront.
Oh I see what you mean. Interesting.
As you allude to there are tools in python to help (I tried pex briefly once, for example). It hasn't really been a pain point for me but I can see why people would spend time on it. I imagine this strategy has its share of tradeoffs and gremlins.
I haven't actually used pex but it doesn't look like it solves this - it's more of a way of distributing full programs. The
.pexfiles aren't editable, which is something you need for this use case.As far as I know there are no downsides. It's basically win-win.
I found it in the docs https://docs.deno.com/runtime/manual/basics/modules/#importing-by-url
Not sure if that generates like a lockfile or how it handles peer deps. Intersting nonetheless.
It can optionally use a lock file. Not sure about peer dependencies tbh.
laughs in coldfusion
PHP is native in Linux then?
How is that different to something like powershell?
You can't run a website off powershell. PHP can render HTML to the browser, so it's perfect for website development. 99% of the web was PHP back in the wild West days.
R. because it's really easy to work on spreadsheets. i know there's pandas for python but at that time RStudio made it look really attractive. i will do anything not to work on excel.
When I took biostatistics in college I asked to use python instead of R to do my assignments and they said no
My only real complaint at the time was using <- to define variables but I felt really strongly about it and that I wanted to use fancy snake language
PHP is a scourge. I wish less server software were written in it. You'll stumble upon some opensource project with a cool UI, run into a problem and find out the docker container has apache, postgres, and PHP in it. Debugging PHP is such a pain and setting up a developer environment is such a hassle because they haven't discovered docker for dev envs yet.
Terrible experience all around.
Anti Commercial-AI license