Zaemis

The PHP development team released PHP 5.2.14 last week and with it comes the end of active support for the 5.2 branch. A bit of dissent rippled throughout the community... but is it really a big deal? Contrary to popular belief, downloads from php.net don't come with an expiration date. There is a lot of legacy code running mission-critical applications. These apps work and are stable so the time, effort, and expense required to upgrade them put doing so very low on a companies' priority lists. A few years ago I worked as a System Administrator for a credit union turned bank; the core processing system was written in PL/I and the ATM switching system was written in COBOL . There are probably more applications written in non-OOP PHP 3 code with register globals running atop a Linux 2.4 kernel than any of us want to acknowledge. But version numbers are just mile-markers that reference a snapshot of the project at a given time. The development team is continually improving PHP...

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...

Traditionally, unobtrusive JavaScript means the code is kept separate from the page's markup. This separation makes it easier to maintain and reuse the code. However, I view unobtrusive code as more than simple separation. True unobtrusiveness means your JavaScript code will function alongside other code that may be loaded by the browser, and the other code will function alongside yours. Don't pollute the global scope in the execution environment; don't clobber global objects, their properties, or prototypes with your own; and be able to work alongside various frameworks.