Interesting Links for 12-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• The Narcissism of Small Code Differences
  (tags: programming coding )
• Virgin Media to launch 152 Mbps service in February 2014
  (tags: uk broadband virgin internet )
• Modern Renaissance Superhero Designs
  (tags: art superheroes viaNeilRodger )
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
  (tags: sweden prison )
• Everything You Know About

Comments

[andrewducker]

Nope, the script didn't do it because I couldn't be arsed dealing with different time zones from a UI perspective (i.e. accepting posting times from users in their own timezone and converting to UTC in the back end) at the time, and decided to do everything in UTC.

The new version does everything in the user's native timezone, because I've taken the time over it now. Java can cope with timezones just fine, I just couldn't be bothered when I wrote it.

(The original Java Date/Time classes _are_ rubbish - but mostly in a fiddly way. Powerful, but a pain because there's some stupid design decisions.)

PHP, however, is _great_ for hacking things together. I'm not knocking it, for a web templating language that's basically grown through accretion is works, or it wouldn't get as much use as it does. Bit like Javascript, really.

As the creator of C++ said "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."

Not to say that I think PHP is a great language - but it clearly gives people a powerful toolset, or it wouldn't have thrived as well as it has.