Zezo forum:

Post by zezo | 2009-06-08 | 17:29:58

I hate php developers.

Employers love them because they are dime a dozen, and they are easily replaced - pick random teenager off the street and he can code in php with 60% chance. The other 40% can learn in 3 days, because the language is 'easy'.

So a bunch of teenagers without any real-world experience gather and start writing some site. In the beginning everything is cool, the software platform is free, development is rapid.

The troubles start months or years later. Site becomes popular and performance and scalability problem arise. Most of the developers have left the company in the meantime, and what they've left behind is not scalable, documented, structured or maintainable in any way.

Money is thrown in hardware at first, with the blind faith that enough CPU power will resolve the problems. But it never does in the long run.

Then the professionals come to wipe behind the 'developers' and the world starts turning again, with the price paid in lost customers, lost profits and so on.

This happens all the time and is one of the reasons for the sorry state of many software projects - from games to plane ticket reservation systems.

Now don't get me started on tech support issues ;)

8 Comments

Post by MaxHipshot | 2009-06-09 | 01:40:30

Huh ? Is Vista written in PHP? That's news to me...

Post by zezo | 2009-06-09 | 02:03:29

Not PHP, but C# / .NET is pretty close. And it's not the language itself, it's more the mindset that it provokes with PHP being the most typical example. And I shall still live to see a sloppy perl coder.

Post by Bolero | 2009-06-09 | 12:24:24

An old article (published 1983) but still essentially true: Real Programmers Don't Use pascal. (http://rixstep.com/2/2/20071015,00.shtml)

Post by zezo | 2009-06-09 | 12:39:32

I've read that one somewhere in the late 80s, translated in local computer magazine. I was just a schoolboy playing with BASIC and 6502 assembly on a Bulgarian APPLE II and Oric Atmos clones then, but it had probably affected me in some way ;)

Post by Vigilante | 2009-06-09 | 17:26:51

The only serious applications I ever coded were in dBase II & III. So, I am just an awed user in this room.

Post by Lauren2 | 2009-06-09 | 23:47:33

Hhhhhhh !

this sound like honey to my ears.
I'm now spending my life hosting tons of poorly coded web site (as you may have guessed zezo) on eight core machines with 32Mb ram.
Somes really crawl on these monsters !..

I always says : give me three time the money I can give you 2 time the CPU power.
Spend a little time having your code reviewed by a real programmer (geek ? :-) you will get at least 10 times optimisation.

I guess that starting my first life as a coder on a 1Mhz Oric 1 (Atmos was for decadent people ;-P ) in full assembly left me some sequels.

Zezo, I have read your optimizing struggle for the routing core.
Once Again : BRAVO !

Post by zezo | 2009-06-10 | 00:03:42

The Bulgarian Oric Atmos replica came out around '86 as the first 'home' computer. The price was 420 LV - that was like $200 at the time, or two month salaries. And it was my first personal machine.

And I know what you are talking about. Usually just adding few indexes to the mysql tables speeds up simple applications orders of magnitude, but developers have never heard about it. I've also seen nightmares like resizing 2048x1536 images down to 160x120 on the fly, when serving them, for each and every request - that brought our hosting server down so we forced the customer to use dedicated server. That customer was medium-sized newspaper ...

Post by Lauren2 | 2009-06-10 | 00:36:32

I got my own Oric 1 (started on CBM Pet & TRS80-I) in 82.
It costed 21500CFP (I let you search for the country :-)
After struggling with the basic I gave a try to the Forth compiler.
This strange langage drove me right to assembly as an easyer langage (yes!)

If you have some spare time to run an Oric give a look at http://www.oricgames.com

My former DBA is the webmaster of this site and a good virtual sailor when working for me. (he scored 52 on the VG)
Now that he moved to a new job he had to leave the VOR on leg 5.
I was a better boss :-P