RE: JAVA400-L Digest, Vol 5, Issue 162

From: Jon Paris


I was gonna stay out of this but ...

From MY personal experience PHP IS much easier than Java. One reason

being
that you can use it without the OO piece if you want. Java really doesn't
let you ignore the OO aspects until _after_ you understand them. I found
that I did well in Java all the time I stayed in java - but when reality
dragged me back to RPG going back to Java was like starting over again.

And maybe that's my problem. Learning PHP is NOT learning OO, unless you
learn the OO stuff. So you end up writing a large body of code in non-OO
PHP, because you need it now. But from my experience (I've been doing OO
for nearly 20 years now), it's pretty much impossible to back-engineer OO
into an exiting code base.

My point is that if you're going to use OO at all, you need to use it from
the get go, and use it correctly. The idea of whacking together a bunch of
non-OO PHP and then later incorporating real OO is somewhat untenable.

Now, if you're saying that you can easily use non-OO PHP to learn the PHP
language and then move learn OO before tackling an application, I can
understand that, I suppose. But frankly, the difference between:

(0..10).each {
Println("Line $it")
}

And

For (int x = 0; x <= 10; i++) {
System.out.println("Line " + x);
}

Just isn't that great (and at least Java spells it out and doesn't require
me to remember a "magic variable name"). So what it comes down to is
whether it is easier to learn the OO parts of PHP or the OO parts of Java,
and frankly I'd rather learn using a language with real OO than something
bolted on.

That's just me.

I like your framework ideas Joe. I'm sure it makes it easier for _your_
customers to make the switch. But not everyone can/will use your stuff -
even if they should.

It's not _MY_ stuff. It's JSP Model 2, taught correctly. The problem is
that too much Java teaching is about the Computer Science intricacies of OO
rather than the results-oriented nature. But we've had this discussion.

And so maybe it's time I sat down and wrote the definitive guide to
Procedural Java.

I suspect that one could as easily build a PHP framework that would
achieve a similar reduction in learning curve - there are after all
a number of PHP frameworks out there already.

Absolutely. A wealth. A glut.

However, my approach is slightly different in that I teach people how to
write their own framework using the native capabilities of the language,
rather then rely on a black box written by someone else.

It may seem like a bit of a fine distinction, but in my experience that
difference can mean the world in debugging a difficult problem.

Try debugging a .NET application when the Microsoft bits go bad.

Joe