Quality Programmers

[JackWagon]

I dont want everyone to get the wrong impression. I love coding new projects. I believe i write the code we are all talking about. Well thought out ... forward thinking and easy to maintain. Its just hard to find guys like us out there all the time. Once the dot com boom/bust happened a lot of guys just left the industry. They made their money and went on to other industries where it was easier to make cash and the hours were better.

 

[kmd24]

That said, are there any Python guys here? (my language of choice)

I write Python. It's not the language I use most often, but I know it enough to get by.

Mostly I write Objective-C and Java these days as a mobile developer. In my past, when I was working for refineries and chemical plants, I wrote more FORTRAN and C. Studied C++ for a while in the late 90's, but I barely recognize it any more since templating and the Boost libraries became mainstream.

I played around with Ruby for a long while, but I've never been that much into it.

I'd prefer to write Clojure code for a living if I could, or failing that some other Lisp, but there isn't a tremendous demand yet.

I'm not saying I'm the best programmer in the world, but the reason it's hard to hire me is that work remotely from one of the lowest cost of living states in the US, and it's not appealing to me to live in NY, SF, or Seattle to make more money just to spend it on my mortgage or rent. The one thing that would make me consider a move is to find a good community where I can actually have peers (I'm currently considering relocating to a few different places liken Raleigh/Durham or Austin for that very reason).

 

[YosemiteSam]

Python is next on my list to learn. I have wanted to learn it for a while, but I just have not had any projects that required it so far. Learning a programming language without a project would be like learning French without ever talking with someone who speaks French.

#reality

Great choice!

My first language was GW Basic. After that, I learned C then C++. If I write in C today, it ends up coming out a mixture of both C and C++. :laugh2:

I started to learn Perl, but after messing around with PHP, I decided that was less cryptic and a better choice. I started using PHP's cli binary to write administrative tools as I've only done one web project and that was a B2B app.

I came across Python around 2000 or 2001 and have never looked back. I absolutely love the language. At first I didn't like the indentation to break up blocks of code, but since I've learned to love it. It really improves readability. (I've come to hate curly braces since too! )

 

[YosemiteSam]

I write Python. It's not the language I use most often, but I know it enough to get by.

Mostly I write Objective-C and Java these days as a mobile developer. In my past, when I was working for refineries and chemical plants, I wrote more FORTRAN and C. Studied C++ for a while in the late 90's, but I barely recognize it any more since templating and the Boost libraries became mainstream.

I played around with Ruby for a long while, but I've never been that much into it.

I'd prefer to write Clojure code for a living if I could, or failing that some other Lisp, but there isn't a tremendous demand yet.

I'm not saying I'm the best programmer in the world, but the reason it's hard to hire me is that work remotely from one of the lowest cost of living states in the US, and it's not appealing to me to live in NY, SF, or Seattle to make more money just to spend it on my mortgage or rent. The one thing that would make me consider a move is to find a good community where I can actually have peers (I'm currently considering relocating to a few different places liken Raleigh/Durham or Austin for that very reason).

We have a part time guy that lives in Seattle that telecommutes. He uses Selenium and writes mostly Ruby code for automated testing of our platform.

 

[Reality]

Great choice!

My first language was GW Basic. After that, I learned C then C++. If I write in C today, it ends up coming out a mixture of both C and C++. :laugh2:

I started to learn Perl, but after messing around with PHP, I decided that was less cryptic and a better choice. I started using PHP's cli binary to write administrative tools as I've only done one web project and that was a B2B app.

I came across Python around 2000 or 2001 and have never looked back. I absolutely love the language. At first I didn't like the indentation to break up blocks of code, but since I've learned to love it. It really improves readability. (I've come to hate curly braces since too! )

When web sites started transitioning from static pages of text and graphics to actual programs, perl was the main language I used. The main reason that perl lost its foothold to php is because of the transition from external cgi to server-side scripting. By that I mean that originally, when you wrote a perl program, each time the web server would call the problem, it had to run the perl interpreter which would then load your program, compile and execute it. Unlike server scripting (integrated) language modules, loading the external interpreter was very resource intensive especially if your site had any serious amount of traffic.

Of course mod_perl was out there that solved this problem but it created another one. The normal perl interpreter was very loose (not strict) when it came to coding. A lot of sloppy techniques were easily overlooked with the command-line interpreter that mod_perl would balk over. Of course mod_perl was attempting to force programmers to clean up sloppy code but it made converting cgi-based perl programs to mod_perl server-side programs a lot more work than many wanted to go through. Then php started gaining in popularity and and perl fell back.

The biggest problem is that perl was around long before the web and they tried to add web support into it where php was designed from the start to be a web programming language though you can use it for command-line programming as well.

#reality

 

[YosemiteSam]

Yeah, I remember the whole fiasco pre loadable server modules. Loadable server modules definitely made it better, but even so, they too are resource hogs. The first time I ran up against it, I had just started working for this media company. Every time they would release something new, their webservers would freeze up from so many people slamming the servers.

It was funny. It was my second day on the job and I had 6 executives standing at my desk looking like they were about to cry because the webservers were frozen up because they had just released some new media.

I logged into the web servers and first thing I noticed was all the servers had was 1gb of memory. The php.ini said it was using a max memory of 32M and http.conf had max clients at 256. (for those that don't understand, 32mb * 256 is a lot more than 1gb of memory! )

Anyhow, I kicked maxclients down to 20 from it's default of 256 (32mb * 20 = 640mb, leaving 384mb for the OS), and restarted Apache. All the sudden all the requests were being completed, though sometimes a bit slow. Every request was being filled though and that made for a lot of happy executives! :laugh2:

The other admin (developer, not really an admin) thought lowering maxclients to 20 wouldn't allow the webserver to server enough people. Sure it will, they will just have to wait in line rather than have the web server over-tax itself all at once!

Depending on the day, our web servers take 8 to 15 million hits per day. (99% of that happens between 8am and 4pm) Mostly ajax requests and each client does around 10 requests per second. I only use two web servers to handle this load, but then I'm not serving php or anything like that. My Apache servers only proxy the connections to the backend JBoss cluster. Actually, just one server can handle the entire load, but I keep two for obvious reasons.