A Change Of Heart
October 1st, 2007It was in some respects a long time coming like a lot of people out there I have made the move to word-press and for once actually managed to create a semi-decent (I think) looking theme. I liked Mephisto but I couldn’t do ‘things’ with it. It kind of leads me into what I have been having quite some thought about latley and that is PHP.
I ve had somewhat of a resurgence in my love for PHP, Ive been toying with RoR and done some C# stuff recently at work and I came to miss the pure dirtiness of PHP. The reason I originally had started to hate PHP can probably be pinned on two things; doing maintenance on existing projects and as a result writing increasingly hacky and horrible code. The change of heart came from realising finally that I could write beautiful OO PHP5 that was incredibly rewarding to write if I wanted to. The epiphany was mostly down to the fact that programing in a language like C# made me give up a lot of my bad programing habits. Its quite easy to write bad C# apps but it quickly becomes quite self evident how horrendous it is, while doing something equally bad in PHP like mixing up function with formatting isn’t so obvious until much later when problems start cropping up. By bringing these good habits from C# and RoR to PHP5 I can write much more reliable and readable code thats also fairly agile. This article by Derek Sivers kinda sums things up.