I'm learning PHP. Technically I'm re-learning it, as I learned it many years ago (version 5.0 if I remember correctly), but between the passage of time ravaging my memory and all of the new features in it and the infrastructure around it, it feels like learning it for the first time.

I understand that the accepted thing to do with PHP is complain about it instead of writing programs in it, but I have no intention of doing that. PHP is a good language that is constantly improving and it has some amazing tools springing up around it. What I want to talk about is the experience of going from a static, strongly typed language to a dynamic, loosely typed one.

I'm working in PHP because reasons (as the young people like to say) and the time frame I'm trying to work with is shorter than would let me thoroughly learn one of my dream languages like Erlang or Elixir. Until six months ago, I was a Java programmer and had over 20 years of experience in the language having worked with it since version 1.0 back in the mid-nineties. I chose not to work with Java for a number of reasons, each of which deserve their own blog post, but basically I don't trust Oracle's stewardship of the Java language and Java web frameworks are generally gigantic monstrosities that I find to be a pain to program in. (I also seem to be entirely unable to overcome my irrational hatred of Spring, so that doesn't help.) The Java language itself is still nice and I continue to like it, but everything that surrounds it these days is questionable to my way of thinking.

It's been too long since we had a cover track around here, so here's a great Cool Jazz rendition of a classic track from The Clash called Should I Stay Or Should I Go.

One of my many and wide-ranging musical influences in my life growing up was punk and The Clash were at the rock end of the punk spectrum. I loved many of their tracks and perhaps this one the most.

Having grown up in a very rural area, my mother used a number of interesting phrases and one of them was about "not teaching your grandmother to suck eggs". For the record, I have no idea whether any of my grandmothers actually could suck eggs, but I can assure you that this phrase meant that it never occured to me to offer them any advice in that life skill.

I thought it was a highly localized saying, but on a whim, I recently searched for the phrase and Wikipedia came to the rescue. They have a page on this exact phrase: Teaching grandmother to suck eggs. Who knew? Most of the opinions I found on the Internet believed that the phrase originated during the 1700's, with a few believing that it may have been even as far back as the 1400's. There is also a good discussion on the origin of the phrase over at the English Language section of Stack Exchange.

As for the meaning, it means to offer advice to one who knows perfectly well what they are doing and who likely knows more than you do on the matter at hand.

I decided to work at the local coffee shop this morning as my father-in-law is visiting and his bedroom is my office while he's here. I'm ordering my bottomless cup of coffee and trying really hard to ignore the pecan sandies that are calling my name when the young lady taking my order started peering at the Apple iPad they use as a sales terminal in a really strange fashion. She notices me noticing her expression and explains that their software was updated over the weekend and now it was harder to use. She was particularly upset about the smaller buttons on the screen.

I felt obliged to apologize on behalf of every computer programmer in the entire world for the difficulties that this update brought. I joked that we're all evil and we like making people's lives more difficult. And then it occurred to me that just based upon the evidence my server had available to her, programmers might as well be evil. We push updates that pass (hopefully) all manner of internal reviews including User Experience, but then when an actual user uses it, it is found to be worse.

Let me say that again:

Mr. Heinlein, as well as being a gifted and prolific writer, was also a keen observer of the human condition.

Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

Robert A. Heinlein (Science Fiction Writer, 1907 - 1988)