PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter
Jeff Atwood at “Coding Horror” – PHP Sucks, But It Doesn’t Matter:
Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?
The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn’t be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can’t argue with the results.
We just talk to each other
Bret Taylor on his present at Friendfeed and his past at Google :
I had a number of accomplishments that I’m really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, “Hey, you think we should do this?” And then people say, yes, we should do it. I haven’t made a single PowerPoint presentation. We don’t even use Microsoft Word documents; we just talk to each other.
It’s a really, really interesting dynamic environment. I think no matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can’t really reproduce it. And I think that’s what’s so infectious and wonderful about a startup environment, that I think draws a lot of people to it (…)
With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.
I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.
Blogged with Flock
Internet Explorer’s Trailing Comma Woes
Internet Explorer is notorious for breaking on trailing commas in JavaScript array declaration. e.g.
var obj = {
a: 1,
b: 2,
};
fails on IE, while all other browsers just ignore the innocuous trailing comma after second element.
Weeding out these commas from JavaScript code is absolute PITA. However, here is a regular expression search string I wrote to search such instances in the code.
,\s*\n+\s*[\}\)\]]
Even better,
,\s*\n+(\s*\/\/.*\n)*\s*[\}\)\]]
matches multiple new lines and comments.
Safari on Windows Crashes Too Often
I’m not much of a fan of Apple softwares on Windows. I like iTunes though, even if it’s a bit bulky. I’ve tried using Safari on Windows for its super pleasing font rendering, aesthetics and, of late, some testing on WebKit/KHTML. However, it crashes just too often to be of any serious use and, of course, doesn’t have any DOM inspector. It has a barely usable JavaScript console though.
On a side-note, I’ve read that Safari can work on Linux under Wine. I’ll give it a try sometime. Now, if only I could run iTunes under Wine 
.
Sun Buys MySQL
Sun could’ve just downloaded MySQL from the site and run without paying .
Anyway, Sun buying MySQL is a big deal and a big surprise. Another slightly related acquisition news today is – Oracle buying BEA, the app server company. Incidentally, Oracle owns both InnoDB and BerkeleyDB – two of the better engine options of MySQL.
