Languages - Tag - vo.rs

Python the good, bad and ugly

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:21:20 +0000

I have written Python for money, for fun, and at three in the morning to glue two systems together that were never meant to speak. It is the language I reach for first for almost anything that is not performance-critical or a browser, and it is also the language that has bitten me in the most avoidable ways. Loving a tool and being clear-eyed about its sharp edges are not in tension — they are the same thing. So here is my honest ledger: five things Python gets genuinely right, five that hold it back, and five that are just plain ugly and always will be.

Ruby the good, bad and ugly

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:15:14 +0000

The first time Ruby genuinely surprised me, I was reading someone else’s code and understood it on the first pass without running it. That sounds trivial until you’ve spent a week deciphering a clever one-liner in another language. Ruby reads like a slightly terse version of what you’d say out loud — 3.times { puts "hi" }, [1, 2, 3].select(&:even?) — and that legibility is not an accident. Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto started designing the language in 1993 and released it publicly in 1995 with an explicit, almost stubborn goal: optimise for the happiness of the programmer, not the convenience of the compiler. Nearly every strength and every wart in Ruby traces back to that one decision.

PHP the good, bad and ugly

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 17:09:56 +0000

Roughly three-quarters of the websites whose server-side language is known are running PHP. That single statistic is the whole argument about PHP in miniature: it is simultaneously the most successful web language ever shipped and the one it is most fashionable to sneer at. I have written PHP in anger since the days when mysql_query() was how you talked to a database and register_globals was quietly turning every form field into a security hole. I have also written it last month, on a modern PHP 8.4 codebase that was genuinely pleasant. Both experiences are real, and reconciling them is the point of this post.