Richard Lynch wrote:
...
Ooooh. At the risk of being branded a heretic, try to pick up another
language or two. Start with something a whole lot like PHP. Maybe Perl,
or even C.
You'll have to shove all your PHP knowledge over to one side of your
brain, cram all the new stuff into the other half of your brain, and then
compare/contrast.
Then, for real fun, try to learn something totally whacked-out different
like Lisp, Scheme, Forth, Logo, or even (blech) COBOL. This will require
even more compartmentalization in your brain-space, and some serious deep
thinking on what makes a program tick. Only after you really "get it" in
a totally different programming paradigm do you achieve that deep
comprehension of Programming with a capital P.
Hmmm.... how does declensional based programming sound?
Remember back when our ParrotHeadPoster was alive and squawking and
ready to flap his wings right out into the news server? Well doing some
searching for text classifiers led me to this really funky, weird,
unusual... twisted... programming tool. The program is called crm114.
"It's not ugly like Perl; it's a whole different *kind* of ugly."
I still am not an expert with this program (hell, the development is
finally getting to where it can use autoconf), but it fits in really
well as a new / active tool that does everything different. And I mean
almost everything.
Everything is a regex.
The default regex engine is called TRE (which supports approximate matches).
The language is declensional instead of parameterized. For the most
part the order that you use for your arguments just don't matter.
Variables look like :*:yourvariable:
Releases don't follow the typical naming convention; instead, people get
blamed for releases. crm114-20050628.BlameCochrane is the new release
that just came out and it is the "CRM114 Galactica Buzzphrase Compliant
Version". It makes use of the new hyperspatial classification... just
read the manual on it, ok?!?!
At least one similarity to PHP though: it makes use of a JIT compiler.
In short, it's a useful and interesting utility. Not just because it
can sort your spam / nonspam email with greater than 99% accuracy... but
because you can adapt it to other tasks by writing your own crm filters.
This is no simple task (I'm still learning how to use it!), but this
is mostly because the way of doing things is just different. The whole
thing is like a computer science project gone mad, but at the same time
it's actually very useful for something.
For those that are interested, grab the new version released today:
http://crm114.sourceforge.net/
Hmmmm. That came out kinda stronger than I meant it... I mean, sure, the
guy who learns C, and knows only C, and codes C all day is a Programmer,
and I'm not knocking that. But there's this sort of "hole" in a guy like
that, and while it doesn't "hurt" them or make them less a Programmer,
it's there, and it's just not the same as a guy who actually groks
something as bass-ackwards (that's a compliment) as Lisp as well as they
do C.
Well, that got long and philosophical, didn't it?
Indeed. But those are some of my favorite posts to read. :)
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