{"id":11298,"date":"2008-06-07T00:51:30","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T21:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=11298"},"modified":"2008-06-07T00:51:30","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T21:51:30","slug":"programming-language-barrier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2008\/06\/07\/programming-language-barrier\/","title":{"rendered":"Programming language barrier"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the frequent things that I hear about programmers is that it doesn’t matter which language the person is using and which language you need him to use, because if he is any good he’ll learn and catch up pretty fast.\u00a0 In other words, if you take a decent Java programmer and push him to write PHP code for you, you’ll only have issues for a few days.\u00a0 Or weeks, at most.<\/p>\n

I understand the reasons for this statement, but I don’t agree with it.\u00a0 At least not completely.<\/p>\n

Firstly, the reasons.\u00a0 They are rather obvoius, but I’d rather stagte them anyway.\u00a0 Computer Science is not specific to any programming language.\u00a0 The concepts and approaches are more or less the same everywhere.\u00a0 Flow control, data structures, and algorithms are not language specific.\u00a0 Each language has its own best practices and recommended variations, but a bubble sort in PHP will be very similar to bubble sort in Java.\u00a0\u00a0 Then you need some common sense, which is also not laguage bound at all.<\/p>\n

Secondly, the disagreement.\u00a0 I think that the Computer Science theory and common sense aren’t the only things that make up a programmer.\u00a0 What makes a lot of difference is experience.\u00a0 Programming languages, in their practical applicatoin, are just collections of software – compilers, linkers, debuggers, libraries, IDEs, etc.\u00a0 Like any other software, programming language software has bugs, undocumented features, and Days When Things Don’t Just Work.\u00a0 It’s the experience with the language that teaches the programmer how to handle the issues of each software piece.\u00a0 And that experience is priceless (almost).<\/p>\n

Even if you’d manage to push a Java programmer into writing PHP code, that would a waste of resources.\u00a0 A Java programmer is a Java programmer, not PHP programmer.\u00a0 He will, of course, learn PHP nuances with time, but, he’ll probably lose a part of his priceless (almost) bagage.\u00a0 Sounds a lot like misuse of resources.<\/p>\n

Another part of my disagreement is not so much reasoned as emotionalized.\u00a0 I’ve seen a few C and Java developers switch to Perl and PHP for their new positions.\u00a0 Not that I was forcing them to or anything, but they did.\u00a0 And the switch was moslty painful to say the least.\u00a0 Here are some of the areas that I noticed as being hard to comprehend.<\/p>\n

Compiling vs. interpreting.<\/strong> Those people who were used to their compilation process were missing something for the first few days.\u00a0 Some needed as much as a week to adopt, even though write-save-reload browser was done a few hundred times a day.<\/p>\n

Debugging.<\/strong> There are two major camps here.\u00a0 In the first one are all those people who live in the debugger.\u00a0 They know all the keyboard shortcuts and they have their highlighting customized.\u00a0 In another camp are people of the simpler nature, those who use print()<\/em> and die()<\/em> for most of their debugging needs.\u00a0 It seems that most people coming from C and Java prefer the debugger way.\u00a0 Most of the interpretted languages do have either a standalone debugger or a built in debugging tool, but it seems that the majority of interpretted language crowd use the print()<\/em> and die()<\/em> approach.<\/p>\n

Sigils.<\/strong> If you don’t know what a sigil is, read this Wikipedia page<\/a>.\u00a0 Because you do know what it is.\u00a0 Many strong type language don’t use any sigils.\u00a0 Most of the loosely typed languages do.\u00a0 Furthermore, when both the language from which you are changing and the language to which you are changing use sigils, chances are there will still be a difference.\u00a0 PHP, for example, uses $ for both scalars and arrays.\u00a0 In Perl though, you’ll get a $ for scalar, @ for array, and % for hash.\u00a0 Perl’s sigils are extremely helpful when figuring out someone else’s code. I remember the pain of having just a $ in PHP, when I was learning it.\u00a0 And I can’t even imagine how confusing it is for people who are used to non-sigilized programming languages.<\/p>\n

Types.<\/strong> As already mentioned above, strong typed language programmers can be often confused with the fact that variables can change their type on the fly, and that they don’t even need to be declared before use.\u00a0 Loosely typed language programmers will often complain about the requirement to define their types.\u00a0 Three of the most common questions that I’ve heard regarding this matter were:<\/p>\n