“Gods, that’s stupid. Why is it being done this way? Have they never heard of naming conventions? Is the language really that awfully designed?”
Learns PHP to find out more.
“Yup…”
HEY! Is PHP ugly? Yes. Does it use stupid naming conventions? Also yes! But it’s an awesome language when you want to get shit done. There’s no other languages out there where you can just write some code in VIM directly on the server through SSH and immediately see your results without any further setup. No frameworks required, no packages, no imports, no buzzwords and hubub, just pure unadulterated utility.
Incorrect. Perl does the same just as well, and it’s a language that actually makes sense while also being uglier.
In my experience Perl is a write-only language. Coming in behind someone else and fixing or writing their code is often slower than just rewriting it
Nonsense, there are tons of systems like that now. I’ve been playing with Deno & Fresh, it’s great. Trivial to install, a pretty great language, Fresh doesn’t force everything to be client side - you can easily write old school completely server side rendered sites if you want but you get to use TSX which is waaaaay superior to the old text based templating systems we used to use (Handlebars, Jinja, etc.).
It also has built in hot reloading by default so even faster than PHP. Literally hit save and you see the results.
What’s this install nonsense? I just looked up Deno and it’s part of an NPM stack. With PHP you just
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Open an Apache server
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Write code
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???
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Profit!
PHP is native in Linux then?
How is that different to something like powershell?
PHP is a scourge. I wish less server software were written in it. You’ll stumble upon some opensource project with a cool UI, run into a problem and find out the docker container has apache, postgres, and PHP in it. Debugging PHP is such a pain and setting up a developer environment is such a hassle because they haven’t discovered docker for dev envs yet.
Terrible experience all around.
Learned Python to try and hack into a porn site.
Well, were you able to hack into the porn site? Python seems like an odd choice for hacking a website.
This was over 10 years ago, maybe 20. I wanted to pick up a new language and I seemed pretty driven, at the time, to hack a certain site. I think I gave up on it and as usual I enjoyed writing the code more than using the app.
It didn’t use webscraping or anything too sophisticated. I just applied a few dictionaries I found online and ran everything through a series of anonymous proxies. Very brute force.
I learned Python and regular expressions to download hundreds of pictures from 4chan. Good times.
Because I wanted to listen to music while doing the dishes.
The Jellyfin Roku client didn’t support audio playback, so I wrote it myself… while learning Roku’s proprietary language 🙄
It occurs to me I’ve literally never tried to play my music library through Roku. I usually just cast to a speaker with my phone. Is it part of the main branch?
Well I thank you for your contribution regardless. Roku is all I’ve got, so it helps to have people like you annoyed enough, and knowledgable enough to contribute.
I was playing this really simple mobile phone game, where you basically go on these mining trips, then you tap the screen as quickly as possible. So, I thought to myself, I wonder if there’s a way to simulate screen taps, to tap at superhuman speeds.
I found an app for that, this app had its own scripting language. Admittedly, there weren’t many concepts to learn in this language, but wait, there’s more.
Then I thought, maybe I can also automate the menus, between the mining trips.
But this language didn’t have support for multiple files, nor functions, you couldn’t even use labels in your goto statements, meaning my code started to get quite complicated.
So, I actually sort of implemented support for goto labels / shitty functions within my program.
Basically, at the start of the file, I had an if-else block, which read the value of a variable and based on that, it would select between different goto statements.
So, if I wanted to “call a function”, I would set the variable to the function/label name and then goto 0.
If I remember correctly, I did still need to manually update the line numbers in that lookup table at the start, but at least, I didn’t have to do it everywhere in the code anymore.
And yes, I did manage to completely automate grinding that game, using this shitty scripting language.
It was an offline game, and not a good one, I didn’t actually care about making progress in it. But scripting it was significantly more fun than playing it myself.
I had totally forgotten until this post reminded me: I originally started to learn Python in order to fix a crossword puzzle program.
That’s a good reason. I used my Java skills to crack a shareware (a solitaire game) because I had no money.
