On Aug 28, 7:24 am, fred <fred.h...@gmail.comwrote:
On Aug 28, 7:05 am, Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.netwrote:
Beginners think tools like Visual Studio are great because they do so
much for you. But in truth, they are probably the worst thing you could
have. And the tool is not the language.
The tools are limited in what they can do. But as long as you stay
within those limitations, you can generate a lot of bloated and obtuse
code very quickly.
Agree with Jerry... I'm teaching my son programming, and we're moving
beyond BASIC and I wanted a portable language that could teach a lot
of high level concepts... so I picked Java. We use a plain text
editor. We could use Netbeans or something, and having programmed in
Java for so long, I think it'd be fine for me... but it hides so much
of what's going on in the background that you miss a lot of
fundamentals. These languages aren't that hard... it behooves you to
know what's going on behind the scenes so you can understand why
something won't work.
For PHP I use "gedit," the standard Gnome Editor... it does syntax
highlighting for a variety of languages and has a lot of plug-ins that
can grow with you as you learn the language. I've got so many code
snippets that I can write a fully documented page that has database
operations and so forth in a matter of minutes... but I worked my way
up to it and the template code is what I've written, not what somebody
else decided was generically the best. You can trim down an IDE and
edit it's templates, but beginners don't seem to take that approach.
I am a long time VB user and windows developer. Visual Studio and .Net
are great for windows applications. And that is what I have been doing
ever since Win 3.11 (DOS before that). Now I am transitioning to web
applications design and that is a whole new world. I did a lot of
study of ASP.Net vs open source and have concluded that open source is
the future of not only the web but of all application design. (How can
Microsoft hire enough programmers to compete with the thousands of
excellent programmers in the open source world, such as are found on
this fantastic forum).
Some issues I am grappling with are:
1. Web Apps are not Web Sites - so much of what you find is geared to
designing web sites whose purpose is to serve up info to the user. To
be an application implies a greater and varied set of objectives. So
issue one is how to achieve the same level of success for an
application using web technologies? Given high speed internet and ajax
and ever expanding tools from the open source community, I have
concluded that it is not only possible but advantageous to go the web
based approach.
2. Fractured Technologies - to the uninitiated, the choices of how to
proceed are almost overwhelming. PHP, ColdFusion, CGI, ASP.Net, *nix/
Windows, html, css, etc. But as you have discovered, the sign posts
are there. For me, the combo PHP, mySQL, Apache, *nix, javascript,
html, css...and you need to learn every one of these to create a
complete application.
3. Mind Set - in the Windows world, everything is in one domain. Now I
have to wrap my mind around what needs to be done client side with
javascriipt vs what has to be done server side with PHP and then wrap
that all in HTML/CSS. What was a simple button click event in Windows
is now a javascript ajax call to php with a call back function to
handle the response...etc.
4. Proprietary Lock Down - I also wanted to steer clear of .Net
because you are locked into using Windows hosting companies (my
experience with them has been very very bad). And then you are locked
into Microsoft's set of tools and functionality (ok, you can mix and
match, but why do that?) In my experience, MS seems to be one step
behind the open source community when it comes to new innovative ideas
(oh oh...I am going to get flamed over that, but it seems that way to
me).
So this has been a rambling stream of consciousness. Just some fuel
for thought...
John