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Oh you're learning to be a chef? That's awesome! What are you cooking? Rat poison a la bleach? That's awesome! Let me know if I can help you with that at all!

• jschwartzi 12y ago
  The difference between a good cook and a crappy cook is that the good cook powered through all the crappy not-quite-there meals and learned everything they could about what makes a meal good by tasting all of their own cooking, and striving for improvement. Learning how to cook to taste is about persistent trial and error, just like learning how to develop software is about persistent trial and error. There's no right or wrong way to cook. It's all about what you personally have a taste for. For example, Natto is something I personally find distasteful. However, people have put effort into learning how to make Natto and they personally find it delicious. It meets their needs. Who am I to devalue their experiences? By the same token, PHP meets needs and there are plenty of people who develop effective software with it. If it's working, and you don't find its warts to outweigh the value you get, then you should continue using it.
  • Retra 12y ago
    >There's no right or wrong way to cook. It's all about what you personally have a taste for. Only if you're cooking for yourself. Additionally, I've developed a near vomitous reflex whenever I read "there is no right or wrong way to..." If there is no wrong way to cook, there is no reason to have cooking schools or to pay people to do it. Of course there is a wrong way to cook. Pretending that you can't fail at something is pretty much guaranteed to ensure failure.
• oneeyedpigeon 12y ago
  The difference - and I hope this isn't being patronising - is that rat poison a la bleach can never be anything but poisonous, whilst a good programmer can be perfectly effective using HTML and PHP (depending on the task, of course).
• lelandbatey 12y ago
  There is a middle way, and that middle way is to realize that the relationship between PHP (and other frequently beat-upon languages) and other programming languages is not at all like the relationship between Rat poison and a normal meal. Most any language can teach the absolute fundamentals of programming (logic and how to control it, loops, if/then, functions), and it doesn't really matter to a beginner, nor will it really affect how well they learn or the quality of their learning. The middle ground is to do as all teachers do: 1. Accept 2. Advise 3. Advocate As a mentor, we first accept the terms of the students curiosity. The student lacks so much information about making any choice, that when they say "I want to learn PHP" it does them almost no good to try to head them off or explain why they should choose something else. As the mentor, we must accept the students line of inquiry and begin to foster this curiosity with the situation we are given. Next, the mentor must advise. Once we have accepted the line of curiosity that the student has chosen, we feed this flame with more information. The students curiosity will take hold and begin to spread to other areas, testing and learning from this original place of understanding. As the student questions, the mentor answers. Eventually, the student will begin to have confidence in what they have learned. They will learn and work for information more readily, and will come to the mentor less and less often for advice and counsel. Once the student is at this point of confidence, the mentor can begin to advocate for ideas and concepts as yet unknown to the student. This is where the real learning happens, where the student has been given enough information to even understand and make sense of the mentors advice. This is the time for the mentor to say "maybe you should not use PHP. As you can see, there are things that are inconvenient and which you wish where different. There are other languages that provide what you seek." The student, now properly equipped to understand the mentors advice, can follow them. This structure is how many of us, inadvertently or not, learn the crafts we know.