Now that I'm back from a small vacations, time to get back to blogging too!
A bit more than six months ago, I changed once again where I work, but this time it was not only a new company, but a new world, with PHP as the flagship. Six months later, I'm not only still alive, but I have learned a lot more than just a new programming language.
Things like the subtle (but vital) difference that supposes working with a fully scripted language (everything ends when the HTTP request ends) from a compiled, object oriented and instanced language (memory pool, state, garbage collection,...).
Things like why PHP has the horrible fame among all object oriented developers, and yes, the language needs a serious internal flamethrower purge that gets rid of all backwards compatibility with un-scoped, function-like development, but as with human actions, not everything is bad, beautiful things can be created too: PHP can implement a lot of design patterns, PHP 5 has object orientation (not perfect, but enough to properly code), PHPUnit allows for some unit testing, and Sellenium to do even flow and UI testing.
"Think big" they say; yes, think big, as big as if a single "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM xxxx" could bring down your entire site if not properly scaled.
But I've not only adquired knowledge on a new language. I have now a broader vision of things (I think ;).
I now know that many of those apparent "linux trolls" are not so but just ignorant of current state of "the Windows ecosystem", that some Mac users are real fanatics, but others know exactly the correct state of monopolism things and perfectly talk about Apple's flaws, that even Linux machines give kernel panics, that Linux Terminals/shells have an incredible hidden power that now I only wish I had in MS-DOS or Windows Command Prompts...
I can now switch from 8 daily hours of PHP coding to one or two related to .NET/C# without problems, and I'm happy to start to become some kind of hybrid coding creature. I'm even starting to care a bit about "presentation" of stuff (at least to try to not do dirty CSS things), thanks to the fantastic designers I work with.