Comments for Language Hacker | Robert Elwell's Blog

Comment on The English Language: A Fractal of Bad Design by Tom

Tom — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:00:38 +0000

Great satire. A lot of programming language elitists seem to forget that we’re working in a world where there is no central language authority, where the (many many) developers of a language have their own ideals, context, concerns and reasons for how they develop and use it. Every user of a language is constantly developing and modifying how they use the language and how it’s used by others; not one of them is all-knowing or beyond relativity. I like Larry Wall’s talks about Perl and why like natural language it can be flexible, expressive, poetic, and often confusing and idiosyncratic. I love PHP and it’s community, and also appreciate the original critique of PHP, because, like being aware of dialect and grammar, “correctness” and “incorrectness” in English, we can continue to improve our mutual understanding through and about language itself.

Comment on The English Language: A Fractal of Bad Design by codebeard

codebeard — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:15:50 +0000

I really appreciated your post! That was a very funny parody. I hope Eevee can recognise the good humour here and has the decency to link to it from his main article.

Comment on The English Language: A Fractal of Bad Design by antialiasis

antialiasis — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:18:30 +0000

“Could you imagine if I wrote this about the fundamental shortcomings of a language from a developing nation, or a low-prestige dialect of any language? Everyone would rightly call me a bigot. I’m suggesting that squelching about the shortcomings of a language without trying to offer solutions does roughly amount to technological bigotry.”

What? The only reason you could argue bigotry when it comes to a natural language, at all, is that the natural language is ingrained with the culture of the people who speak it, and promoting the abolition of the language could be taken as an attack on the culture. Even then, it would be a gross overreaction to call it bigotry merely to point out where the language is genuinely asinine. My native language is spoken by about 300,000 people in the world, and I’ll still nod right along with anyone attempting to learn it as a second language who is being driven insane by the lack of even halfway reliable rules for basically any of the grammar (I laugh at English-speakers who think their irregular verbs are anything remotely approaching bad). Meanwhile, for the record, “offering solutions” would actually be genuine bigotry, by assuming that our culture and our language should change to accommodate you.

But bigotry against programming languages doesn’t exist. Programming languages are not ingrained into a person’s cultural identity. Criticism of your favorite programming language is not an attack on you; the original article even acknowledged that there are talented PHP developers who can do good work with it as a tool even though it’s a poorly-designed one. You’re just trying to silence meaningful criticism by pretending somehow it’s oppressive.

Comment on Search Haters Gonna Hate? by loup

loup — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:03:21 +0000

I think he’s right about one thing. Computers could do so much better to present relevant information you ‘own’, like your own files, contacts, and other things than search. I never search for apps on my phone because i know where they all are. I do search for contacts because it’s quicker than scrolling through an uberlong list. There are different UIs at play here and one is more effective than the other for my use cases. Google’s mobile platform does revolve around search more than providing good clear spatial and logical UIs. Dr. Whittaker is definitely conflating UIs for things with knowledgebases and real search engines where real business takes place.

Comment on Search Haters Gonna Hate? by Josh Stone

Josh Stone — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 20:10:17 +0000

I agree, and would like to provide another response. Searching has become more work, as search engines try to be more helpful. They seem to be DESIGNED to find the “one page” that I’m “looking for.” Google corrects my spelling, no matter what I do, and I end up applying more effort all the time to do a simple find. Sometimes it takes me a minute or more to find what I’m looking for.

Comment on Zend_Search_Lucene Tips by Lachlan Pease

Lachlan Pease — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:42:29 +0000

An excellent article that I’ll certainly be leveraging, and recommending to anyone interested in full-text search in PHP. I might recommend, however, that you use the following implementation of My_Filter_Searchable – it should be faster (even if only marginally), and use less memory.

class My_Filter_Searchable extends Zend_Filter { public function __construct() { parent::__construct(); $this->addFilter('StripTags') ->addFilter('Alnum') ->addFilter('StringTrim') ->addFilter('StringToLower'); } }

Comment on Stack Overflow Fatigue? by exoboy

exoboy — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:01:51 +0000

When I started using SO, it was great! I often asked questions and answered them.

However, lately I have noticed that within MOMENTS of posting a question I get a flurry of “You don’t want to do it that way” comments. Or I get immediately tagged with a “This is a duplicate question” tag, even though I searched and found nothing similar enough to truly be considered a duplicate. Or, I get a lot of comments on why this is a bad question…. Holy #$%@! I just want some help, I do not want a critique on my very existence.

Honestly, all of these bad-taggers are making it more about the procedural rules and accepted behaviors then about the QUESTIONS…. this is why I find myself going back less and less. If you don’t do things they way THEY would, then be prepared for an onslaught of crap.

I love the idea of SO, but something needs to be done about all of the white-noise generating users who have nothing better to do than to nit pic over useless minutiae.

If you don’t like a question, don’t vote it down! Just don’t answer it or comment and let it die in obscurity….

Sheesh!

Comment on Zend_Search_Lucene Tips by Zend_Search_Lucene Tips « madclog.nl

Zend_Search_Lucene Tips « madclog.nl — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:26:12 +0000

[...] Found a good article with some tips on implementing Zend Framework’s search engine: Lucene http://robertelwell.info/blog/zend_search_lucene-tips/ Share and [...]

Comment on Partial vs. Helper in the Zend Framework: When to use which? by Ivan Ilijasic

Ivan Ilijasic — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 11:00:06 +0000

Good article. I’ve been playing with ZF for a while and this is my practice:
- If I need some functionality that I’ll use in almost every page, I use helper. For example, I use helper to display if user is logged
- If I have specific module for my right sidebar, I use partial helper method because If I have several modules with different display logic for each page, it’s much easier for me to have a specific template snippet with it’s own model.
- If I have some static snippets (footer, static header logo part etc.) I use render method

Comment on Rediska and Sesh: Minimizing RAM usage in your session. by Jak Sprats

Jak Sprats — Sat, 25 Sep 2010 02:18:52 +0000

Im a redis user and I was working on a project that had to be very tight w/ RAM, so I forked redis and came up w/ redisql (code: http://github.com/JakSprats/Redisql documentation: http://code.google.com/p/redisql/). Redisql is basically a SQL database on top of redis, so it is almost (85% speed) as fast as redis, but it has a lot of memory optimisations that redis does not, because I REALLY needed to be tight w/ RAM.

The project may be of interest to you, and I forked rediska and wrote a client: (http://github.com/JakSprats/Rediska) so trying it out should be straightforward, in your case.

If your data can fit into a schema, this is a definite win in terms of memory usage.