NYCPHP Meetup

[Adam Fields]

On Mon, Dec 09, 2002 at 10:55:22AM -0500, max goldberg wrote:
[...]
> I think to truly be qualified you need to understand many things beyond
> syntax, which most people don't get. It seems no one even writes code
> for high performance and low resource usage any more. Everyone needs 
> their hand held through the most basic of exercises. I'm not sure if 
> it's just my opinion and current situation, it just seems like a lot
> of people who make a living of programming/scripting web applications
> have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

You make a number of assertions here, which are not necessarily
related:

1) People write inefficient code.

Yes, that's true. But high-performance/low resource usage isn't always
the best thing. What if making your code highly tuned takes you three
times as long and makes the code completely incomprehensible to anyone
who comes along after you? Like everything else, efficiency is a
trade-off for other things. The problem isn't that people write
inefficient code, it's that they don't know the difference. Much of
"web scripting" is written in a RAD environment and should be written
in such a way that it's fast to code, fast to replace when the
functionality changes, and easy to read. This is not to say that
efficiency should be ignored, but making every last component perform
at its optimum is probably a waste of valuable developer time that
could be better spent on other things (such as writing better comments
and documentation).

2) People don't know what they're doing.

There is a difference between a junior developer and a senior
architect. Similarly, there's a difference between somone who picked
up the PHP-in-24 hours book last week and someone who's deployed
dozens of successful projects. If you're hiring, and you don't know
the difference, your project isn't going to succeed if you're doing
anything remotely complicated. Junior developers have a valuable place
on a development team, but when they're in charge of the development
effort (or solo), it's only natural that their lack of experience is
going to show up in the final product.

> I read a good rant which made a lot of sense to me at
> http://m.bacarella.com/papers/secsoft/html/

There are some good points there, certainly, although most of that is
aimed at admins and systems programmers. A lot of it is just
frustrated ranting that is amusing but not productive.

-- 
				- Adam

-----
Adam Fields, Managing Partner, fields at surgam.net
Surgam, Inc. is a technology consulting firm with strong background in
delivering scalable and robust enterprise web and IT applications.
http://www.adamfields.com