Or anyone else for that matter. Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback about my posts that I’m suggesting things that are going to get less experienced developers into a lot of trouble. Or that people are going to use my posts as justification for bad practices. Or that people are going to cause major issues by putting experimental concepts into production. My initial response is “That’s their problem.”

Today’s post is in response to an article that I read yesterday entitled They Write The Right Stuff. It’s a very interesting and insightful look into one of the most complex and critical pieces of software ever produced (also one of the most expensive). I think we can learn a lot from what they are doing, but I also think we should avoid copying what they are doing. The point that’s missed is practicality.

Every developer who studies computer science (and most who haven’t) has heard the phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out“ before. It’s such a logical concept that it’s almost beyond refuting. Almost. While the phrase still definitely holds true for some situations, it doesn’t hold for most. How can such a logical and straight forward saying lead us down the wrong path?

“Don’t Reinvent The Wheel” is a phrase that we hear used all the time in software development. Usually it’s used in the context where a library exists to do what the user wants, but they are writing their own. While the sentiment is usually correct, I can’t stand the implication of the phrase. Therefore, I can’t stand it when people use that phrase without understanding what it really means. Let me explain:

If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve likely heard me use the term “N-Tier Architecture” before. Today’s question comes from Arno. He basically asked “What is this N-Tier Architecture thing you keep talking about?”… So, to answer his question, a N-Tier Architecture is one that uses more than one tier. Of course there’s more to it than that…

In this day in age, it seems that the community trend is completely and unequivocally trending towards the use of web application frameworks. So much so that the defacto first comment to someone asking how to do something seems to be “Just use a framework, and it’ll solve the problem for you.” While I completely understand why this is the case, I can’t say that I agree with it. And while I do believe that frameworks serve a purpose, I think that they are vastly over-used. Let me explain why…

In response to last week’s ask for questions, I received a number of questions that I’d like to address. Since it would only do the question justice to have a dedicated post for each question. So I’m going to try to do one post per week on a user-submitted question (probably on Wednesday, but no promises). This week’s question is a rather abstract one:

I’ve been learning a lot about service layers and managers and domain objects and one thing really confuses me. Why is MySQL being turned into a non-relational database? It has so much power, so much flexibility, but it seems like many programmers want to abstract it to the point of near uselessness.

Now, there are so many facets to that question that it’s hard to find a starting point. But let’s try:

The concept of generators was recently proposed for addition in PHP’s core (Possibly for 5.5.0). While I believe that this is a great tool, it appears that many PHP developers aren’t familiar with the concept of generators. So I thought I would take a little time and explain some of how it works, and how it can be used to greatly simplify code.

One of the most powerful changes that PHP5 brought to the table was the ability to autoload classes. It’s such a useful tool that it was the first standard the FIG group put forth. Almost every single major PHP framework and library uses an autoloader to include its classes. It always felt somewhat wrong to me to autoload in production at runtime. So I decided to give it a bit more exporation…

I was asked an interesting question via email yesterday. The question is fairly simple. The answer, not so much… So, rather than reply in an email, I figured that I’d write a post about it instead. The question, simply stated, is: When comparing a float to an integer using ==, where does the conversion happen?

So, let’s begin…