Quote from: smashingred at Sep 24, 2007, 02:05 PM
The funny thing is that I think Derek Sivers also learned web design from Rails. It isn’t a design. All his views look like the generated rails views with no modifications to the stylesheets. If you look at the generated views in any rails screencast or have played with rails at all, you know what I mean.
I think one of the comments indicated that Derek knows no languages other than PHP, HTML, CSS, and SQL so I’m sure that whatever he knows about OOP, he learned from Rails. You’re clearly right about the design too. I notice the same thing about 95% of all Drupal pages. They all look just like the sample site in Drupal (ugly as sin).
Having come from C++, I always feel as if I have one hand tied behind my back when I’m doing php, or web programming in general. Having a form page that submits to ITSELF and then detects whether the page access is the first, second, or nth, drives me crazy.
Separating presentation from code and designing for easy maintenance sometimes means that presentation has to occur on separate pages. It takes some odd moves to make sure that stuff from one page is available on another page and that code on one page knows what has happened in the user interface on another page. Creating PHP objects that are stored as SESSION variables seems like such a kludge to me that I avoid it when possible.
I’ve seen some creative solutions to this in the MODx snippet code but none is really satisfying (to me anyway), but I have great hopes for future releases of MODx. Jason and others are clearly working in this direction and I can’t wait to see what’s coming.
I think Rails solves some of these problems but it ties BOTH hands behind your back. I’ve also learned to avoid like the plague any language or platform that mentions Smalltalk or Ada in its description. It almost always means that it was originally created by a student with no real-world programming experience as a Masters or Ph.D. thesis.
As an example, see Alice (
http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/alice/), which is being touted as a language to use to teach OO programming that won’t scare women away from computer science. Putting aside the incredible insult to women, one look at it will tell you that it will never hack it in the real world (see Pascal). Does anyone besides me remember Turtle Graphics? It too was was supposed introduce OOP in a non-threatening way and to bring women into computer science. I once actually taught a class in it to fourth graders. No useful program was ever written in it.
But I digress . . .
Once MODx lets us have objects that automatically persist with the usual OOP bells and whistles (and a solid code editor that has syntax highlighting, autocompletion of HTML and PHP constructs, and lets us use the Tab key as God intended), it will rule the world.
Bob
MODX Staff
MODX Staff
