Image by Balakov via Flickr In The importance of bad code (or, WordPress and why I am a psychic), Marco Tabini proposes the idea that we need bad code. Or at least that we should be tolerant of bad code in open source projects because that invites participants that might otherwise not contribute. This is [...]
Posts under ‘PHP’
Don’t refactor without unit tests
Image by niallkennedy via Flickr Brandon Savage is writing a series on code improvement using a code example (starting with Peer Review: Taking Code And Making It Better). In other words, it’s about refactoring, which is practically my favorite subject. Although I don’t agree with all of it, it’s mostly good advice. I recommend it. [...]
Real programming with PHP 5.3 (part 4): A more realistic example
Image by hartboy via Flickr My previous example in part 2 was just “hello world”, so I’m going to try for something more like the real world. You may find this example unusual, but it does work. I took the PageRange class I used in my July 2007 php|architect article and converted it to the [...]
Sounds like an average PHP app to me
Image via Wikipedia Dean Wampler blogs: Is the Supremacy of Object-Oriented Programming Over? “The fact is, for a lot of these applications, it’s just data. The ceremony of object wrappers doesn’t carry its weight. Just put the data in a hash map (or a list if you don’t need the bits “labeled”) and then process [...]
Most confused discussion in the known universe
Image by B Tal via Flickr How confused can a discussion get? As confused as the discussion in the comments to Benjamin Eberlei’s Explicit Code requires no comments – Only bad code does. This discussion has a fake identity, and nobody seems to notice. As you can see, the blog post claims to be about [...]
Show me your code comments and I’ll show why you don’t need them
Brandon Savage has written a blog post On Code Commenting And Technical Debt. He believes that code comments are a good way to minimize technical debt. I’m surprised to find the term technical debt mentioned without being accompanied by the term refactoring. Refactoring is generally recognized (outside the PHP world) as the way to pay [...]
10 ways to improve your code
Image by Jared Richardson via Flickr I discovered a video presentation available from QCon SF 2008 by Neal Ford called 10 Ways to Improve Your Code. Although the examples are in Java, most of the presentation is relevant to PHP. There are some ideas here that I’ve never heard of myself, such as “anti-objects”. Some [...]
Real programming with PHP 5.3 (part 3): Links
Image via Wikipedia After the previous post in this series, additional independent implementations of the idea of JavaScript-style classes have turned up. So I’m going to list them and comment briefly on the differences. I hope this will be helpful to anyone who actually wants to use this in practice and needs to decide on [...]
Real programming with PHP 5.3 (part 2): JavaScript-style classes
In part one of this series, we looked at the ability to use lambda functions or closures to process arrays. In this part, we will see how closures can be used to build classes in a completely new way. After I did my own research, I discovered that someone had beat me to it. As [...]
Ada versus Mars and Venus
Image via Wikipedia On the carafe belonging to our coffee maker, there is a barely discernible spot that tells you how far to unscrew the lid in order to open it so that you can pour coffee from it without getting a flood of it in your lap. I never found this spot until it [...]