[Phpwm] [Fwd: PHP developer - lead role - read on!!]

[Phil Beynon]

> > One of the problems I see these days is that most programmers can't see
> > past
> > the command set and really dont understand the fundamentals of what the
> > underlying hardware is doing.
>
> I think that's where a lot of Uni kids are going wrong when they
> come out of
> Uni.

Don't worry thats not just confined to programming - most of the students in
elec eng couldn't do basic things like solder, since they had all built
everything they ever made on breadboard! :-)

> At uni we covered OO principles, and that was it! We certainly
> didn't cover
> "how to store and access data in
> terms of using normalised structures" (mind explaining what this is? :D),
> and we did lots of software development...

Re-read the explanation of the Heart of Gold's drive system in Hitch Hikers
Guide for the best answer to that! :-)

> But none of it translates well into real world... Our OO example was
> Monopoly (game, board, square .. etc classes), which at the time made very
> little sense to me (and I really wasn't convinced OO was the way
> forward)...
> Since working for a PHP dev company, and using real world
> examples of OO, I
> absolutely *love* it (/me has written a badass MySQL abstraction
> layer, and
> /me thinks its mint).
>
> Anyway, in a language like PHP (where you probably aren't always going to
> know exactly what hardware it's on), do we really need to know "what the
> underlying hardware is doing"? And might you even say that a language like
> PHP might also slightly encourage people to use the huuuge
> command set?
> (Why
> write 6 lines of code when file_get_contents() will do it for you?).

With file system command then yes, use commands like that by all means, if
only for filesystem safety.
But what happens when you get some off the wall interfacing requirement
using a data capture card where you need to be able to configure, control,
capture and analyse data to and from it and there's no command in PHP to do
that?

Don't ever allow yourself to be 100% limited by the constructs of any
language or hardware, thats a barrier that really hurts when you run into
it!

Phil

> Just a few thoughts.
>