Nothing Much
Kristi: still sick. Me: mostly better. Emma: healthy and beastly.Yesterday's excitement: running a snake 15' down the bathtub drain to find and remove a blockage that Kristi's efforts with Drano had failed to budge. Total cost: under $7.00 for the snake, which really is an investment rather than a cost when you live in an older house.
When that's the highlight of your weekend, you pretty much know things were slow.
My experiment in porting CDFFL to a LAMP environment continues. I'm restricting myself to PHP4 and MySQL4, since later versions of PHP (with better OOP integration) and MySQL (with subselects) don't seem to be widely supported among the low-priced webhosts. What I'm finding is that PHP is a great idea in theory. In execution? Not so much. For one thing: no built-in interactive debugger. (I understand you can debug using third-party commercial or freeware software, but I'm talking about what's lacking in PHP itself.) Another thing: compilation errors tell you almost nothing about what the error was. Which reminds me of perhaps my biggest criticism: no way (at least, none I've found) to force the interpreter to require that you declare variables. Every Perl programmer knows the value of 'use strict;' -- there doesn't seem to be an equivalent feature in PHP.
I don't seem to be alone in my feeling that, as compared to Perl, PHP kinda sucks. Perhaps there are equivalent lists out there about how PHP is far superior to Perl, but I haven't found them. The fact is, I'd drop the whole PHP idea in favor of embPerl right now, if I felt secure that these cheaper hosting sites supported it. In any event, I'm learning something new -- even it is something kind of goofy.
posted by MeanMrMustard @ 11:23 AM
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