Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting...
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Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion describes the state of Perl, the language and the community. In his 11th address, he discussed the past, present, and future of scripting languages, including the several dimensions of design decisions important to the development of Perl 6.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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An implementation of the famous Snake game written for MS-DOS in Pascal. This is a project from my early days of programming which I wish to update and develop as it's a bit rough around the edges and relies on libraries more than it really should. Othe   Although this program is in version 2, I have had it since long before my SourceForge.net days and have just decided to take another look at it after 6 years on the shelf.
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Pierre-Alain Joye takes a look at building Cairo (a vector-based graphics library for PHP) on a Windows system.    While trying to get the cairo (and pimp) PHP binding ready to be released, I finally sit down and port Wez build cscript to cairo. It still needs some cleanup, a nice summary message but it works already. I tested it with Visual C++ Express Edition but it should work with other versions as well.   My next goal is to add the tests (nmake tests) and fix the nmake instal    He describes the process he went through to try to get things up and running, but is still having a few issues and has required a few tweaks to get it working. He also links to two resources: a ZIP of the development libraries and a ZIP ready to use package.
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The open-source veteran is finding out the hard way that some income statements can be tricky.
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Persistently practicing good programming will make you a better programmer. It can be difficult to find small tasks to practice, though. Fear not! Here's a 30-minute exercise to improve your testing abilities and your understanding of Perl's taint mode.
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On Paul Jones' weblog today, there's a posting covering one of the banes of PHP life - form processing/handling.
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On the "PHP in Action" blog, Dagfinn Reiersol has posted some ideas about developing PHP applications (really, any applications) from scratch - by faking it.    So  where and how on earth do you  start?  Let's say we know one thing about the result; call it the known fact. Do we start by  making educated guesses about what should be in the black box? A lot of development is like that.   Enough of this philosophical mumbo-jumbo; what does it mean in practice? Well, it's test-driven development, and more specifically, it's what Kent Beck calls the Fake It patttern. You implement a test for the result, then you hard code the result. It's an absolutely weird idea that's magical in its effect because it get you started. And as the German expression goes, aller Anfang ist schwer--all beginnings are difficult.    He illustrates the point with a set of code examples - one side being the unit test (written first, of course) and the other the actual code. All it does is set a URL to a variable inside a class, but the point is made.   Starting at the high level is good when you know the full scope of the project, but that's not always a possibility. This is a good alternative to getting started without causing too many issues down the road.
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Matthew O'Phinney has two new posts that talk about something object-oriented developers seem to shy away from - globals in their classes and how they can make things more difficult to make "embeddable applications" a reality.   In my previous entry, I ranted about the use of globals in popular PHP applications, and how they make embedding said applications difficult. I develop using object-oriented practices, and can honestly say I can't recall ever having slung a global variable around in my own code. Globals seem hackish to me, and as a result, trying to get applications that use them to behave correctly has been a challenge.   In the first part, he notes an interesting find about the $GLOBALS value and illustrates with a code example how he was able to get around it in his instance (wrapping a Serendipity instance in a Zend Framework app).   In part two, though, and uses another code example to show what kind of issues he was seeing with the $GLOBALS - a script that sets some globals in different instances and echoes the results back out.
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Devshed has posted a new article covering one of the hottest topics in the PHP community right now - security.   Security in a scripting language such as PHP is more developer-dependent than language-dependent. In other words, although the language offers you the tools to create secure code, it cannot prevent insecure code. Thus, the degree to which code is secure almost entirely depends on how security conscious a developer is.   The article looks at three security-related topics:  Register globals error reporting code exposure  and for each provides explanation and code where needed to help the reader understand the issues and possible problems with them.
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Four top tips I was talking with a fellow IT professional recently who was saying that you should "program simply" but "design with complexity". I do understand the point that he was trying to make - that is, during the design stage take into account the problems in your domain so that these have been worked out as much as possible before the coding starts.â¦
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Newer computer chips with multiple processors require dauntingly complex software and programmers are having a hard time keeping up.
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PHP isn't exclusively for Web pages. You can use it like Perl for cron jobs and other tasks.
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Yes, Cobol is dying -- just not yet. In that gap, some wily coders see opportunity for a career, or at least a secure job.
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Here's the new Reddit for Scripting News... http://reddit.com/r/scripting/  Please, if you're a regular reader of this site, bookmark it, and when you want to contribute a link to the community, add it there. Do the normal thing you do with Reddit or Digg, move articles up or down, according to your opinion of how relevant they are to the community defined by this weblog.  Warning: I will moderate, heavily if necessary, to keep it from being abusive or overly immature. Sorry for having to post the caveat, but you know how it goes.
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An IntelliSense Cure for Method Madness? Hands on We were six months into the project before we even realised we had a problem. Until that point, we had assumed IntelliSense was a trivial matter that could doubtless be wrapped up in an afternoonâs coding. After all, how hard can it be to program some lists of names that drop down when someone types a dot?â¦
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A programmer in this county government IT shop decides he's bored and wants to take over the security job, too. But maybe he doesn't have quite the right approach to the work.