I’ve recently posted some of my thoughts on PHP. If you enjoy the topic, here is an excellent post over at Coding Horror, which reminds why PHP sucks so badly and also why it will stick around for some time to come.
Tag: language
PHP 6 – hopefully not the end of the road
I’ve heard plenty of positive buzz about PHP 6 in the last few weeks. Yes, it’s coming out. Yes, it brings quite a few improvements, including better Unicode support, better security, and more help for larger projects through namespaces. However, I hope that it won’t be the last PHP release, since there are so many other things that need fixing.
Here is a good overview, as compared to the best programming language ever – Perl. But this probably reminds you of a famous Euro-English joke, no? But I do miss sigils and proper hashes. I’d love to see better memory management when programming objects. I’d love to see improved database interfaces with prepared statements and database abstraction layer. I would really welcome a cleanup in function names and return values. I … I … I … I hope that PHP 6 is not the end of the road, and that PHP 7, PHP 8, and PHP 9 will follow.
Hope to see more language controls in Google Reader
If you read this blog even for a short while, you probably know that I depend on many Google tools, such Gmail and Google Reader. As a power user, I believe I know pretty much everything these services have to offer. I also know a few things that these services don’t have on offer yet, but which I’d gladly welcomed.
I already mentioned a sharing of interesting items in Google Reader with your contacts. That’s a really nice feature. And you can even control which users you see shared items from. However, one important thing is missing in that functionality – language control.
You see, I don’t have that many friends who are using Google Reader and share items, but even those few that I have speak a total of 7 languages (Russian, English, Greek, French, Ukrainian, Dutch, and German). Not only they speak this languages, but they also share a lot of items in those languages. That is sort of useless, since I only know two languages – Russian and English. These two are enough to provide the common ground for communications with all of my friends.
So, what I would really like to see in Google Reader, is a new setting which would let me filter my friends’ shared items to only those languages that I can understand. I know this can be a bit tricky to implement (how does the system know in which language the shared item is? or, even, what should it do if shared item is in more than one language?), but it would be really helpful functionality. And a huge time saver too, since then I wouldn’t have to go through all those items that I have no understanding off and marking them as read.
Should such a feature appear, I’d like to see it taken to extreme. I should be able to automatically tag or do searches on content in specific language. This will give me a useful tool of comparing hype about the same topic in different language communities.
Flickr makes Lolcat official
For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages. It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.  While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).
Today, however, was different. It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.
Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat. The name comes from LOL – an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat – an animal on the picture.
As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like i can haz cheezburger). And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.
My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post. My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”
Simpler Google Talk translations?
Google has recently added Gtalk bots that can do translations to various languages, mostly available with Google Translate. While I’m all for helping people understand each other better (even though there are certain complains regarding the quality of translation), I think this functionality could have implemented simpler.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it out myself, I’ve only read about it and saw the screenshots.
The problem that I see with the implementation is it being one way. The bots are named fr2en and fr2en. Which means that in order to keep up with conversation in the language foreign to you, you’ll need to have two bots nearby, not one. Why? Because if you will ask a person in his language a question, he will likely reply in the same language. So you will need to translate both to and from the language. I think this should have been done with one bot, not two.