In Golgota

There was recently an interesting post about scripting languages by Steve Yegge. What I particularly liked are the hints on other languages he gives and his invitation to try new languages.

I have been programming PHP since 1999 and felt a need to learn something new approximately when they launched Rails a few years ago. But instead of learning Rails, because I don't usually follow the hype, I decided to learn Python.

So, recently, I have been learning Python, then Ruby and now the Lua programming language. Out of these three languages, my favorite is Lua and it is where I spend most of my time now.

They are all excellent languages to learn and in many ways, they are better than PHP. As I said in a previous post, I now see PHP as a big blob which along the years have been developing in too many directions and is now facing a lot of problems because a lot of things were implemented incorrectly and were not carefully planned. It is not obvious at first, but when you start looking at other languages, you understand how some things could have been done and you realize how wrong they are in PHP. I am thinking of all the stuff you find in SPL, create_function(), call_user_function(), ::, $this->, parent::, instanceof, is_a(), the way static are handled, etc, etc. It's all a mess. And it starts to look in blog posts. From time to time, I read things about how nice it would be to have closures, traits, anonymous functions, weak references, duck typing in PHP and some hacks on how to imperfectly implement them.

And because PHP is not idiot proof, you will find a lot of people there with little knowledge about programming. Like this week's post of someone who says "function in_array() sucks because it is slow"... The more I know about programming and the less I find the PHP community interesting. It's like all the interesting people here are doing things secretly and don't take the time to share their experiences (unless they write books).

And the last things I have started to dislike is the way a company like Zend is taking over the language. I have also recently very much disliked Oracle buying InnoDB and Sun buying MySQL, although I was not surprised for MySQL given the road they had taken lately, which is actually a lot like the road PHP is taking with Zend at the moment. With rumors about Microsoft, Oracle, IBM buying Zend, I start to feel the fear. Because in the end, who decides what goes where in PHP core?

Here is a list of programming languages that deserve a look soon:

• http://www.scala-lang.org/
• http://www.digitalmars.com/d/
• http://www.haskell.org/
• http://www.iolanguage.com/
• http://nice.sourceforge.net/
• http://boo.codehaus.org/
• http://www.squeak.org/
• http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Bigloo/
• http://www.erlang.org/

Here is a quick reminder on how I built Lpdf, the Lua bindings for pdflib, on my Intel mac.

• 1. First, installed the PDFLib binaries
• 2. Installed Lua from source
• 3. Didn't bother about the Makefile in Lpdf
• 4. Used the following sequence

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET="10.3"
gcc -I/usr/local/include -Wall -O2 -fno-common -c
     -o lpdf.o lpdf.c
gcc -Wall -bundle -framework Carbon
     -undefined dynamic_lookup -o pdf.so lpdf.o 
     -L/usr/local/lib -lpdf

At first, I forgot the -framework Carbon flag which lead to dyld: Symbol not found: _FSPathMakeRef.