[Liverpool] Hi!

[Stephen Mount]

I understand what you are saying about PHP - the main reason why I write
PHP at the moment is that it is generally available on many web hosts. I
don't (usually) write CLI-based applications using PHP to do any sort of
tasks it's mainly for the web. I understand the security concerns of
PHP-based applications and it seems a put-off that so many people just
use PHP as it's simple to pick up because of it's good documentation -
but this obviously causes the concern that people are using PHP/MySQL
without escaping strings and all sorts of bits.

I'll definitely take your advice on trying other languages Simon, and
re: chris - I think you definitely have a much better amp than I
have :-)

Also, re: Simon - I understand your point about learning different
languages and on the way I could learn perhaps a more flexible way or
more efficient way using other languages which also could be beneficial.

On a more geeky note, I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 on my MacBook Pro and
everything seems to be going well. Still not found a good reason to move
from OS X but just trying things out! It's mainly the fact that Ubuntu
doesn't have the Adobe suite. Ubuntu's text rendering is great but OS X
+ Adobe + it's font support just wins for me. Also the UI seems more
polished and with things like Cocoa and all that jazz it just makes
everything seem so native and just plain _good_.

I would have thought as a linux user group though you'd have different
views, but still I'm a linux sysadmin for various people, mainly with
web servers/ security and all sorts. We use Ubuntu in fact for most of
our DreamCreators servers, with the exception of one or two CentOS boxes
(booo)

What distros do you use?

Thanks for all advice,

Stephen.

On Sat, 2009-04-25 at 16:58 +0100, Simon Johnson wrote:
> 
>         Hi Stephen,
>         
>         
>         Just wanted to follow up Chris by saying that I was extremely
>         impressed with your knowledge and understanding of audio
>         stuff. I've been heavily interested in music and audio
>         engineering since around the time I was 15, and I didn't know
>         then as much as you do now. As for your web magickery, you
>         would far exceed my knowledge as I frittered my youth away on
>         music. It's too late for me!
>         
>         
>         Keep up the "geekery" :) Knowledge is power, and all that.
>         
>         
>         Andrew
>  
> Yes, I have to second all the comments in this thread. For a 15 year
> old, your knowledge was extremely impressive. 
> The only bad life decision that you appear to have made so far is the
> choice of PHP. :) When I was your age, I was hacking around in Visual
> Basic 3 - so I can hardly talk.
> 
> My only advice would be to try a bunch of languages. Just like
> learning another spoken language gives you insight in to your own
> tongue - learning other programming languages exposes you to different
> takes on the same problem.
> In particular, I would recommend something head bending like Scheme.
> God, in his act of creation, probably used Scheme. It is simple
> language and that simplicity gives it great power. Unfortunately, it
> lacks tools support and a comprehensive set of libraries. 
> 
> Learning Scheme teaches you how to think flexibly. However, if you
> want to get any actual stuff done you'd probably want to use a
> language like Python.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Simon
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