New Years Developer Resolutions

I thought it might be interesting to put up some New Years Resolutions relating to developing software. Here is what I have been able to come up with.

• Learn a new language (Ruby, Python, Lisp, something)
• Get better with that AJAX thing (this is probably a given)
• Write more unit tests
• Finish the pet projects that I have at home
• Learn DMX and the Data Mining portion of Analysis Services 2005

What does everyone else have on their list?

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software]

More on Language Popularity

Last night I was reading Considering Ajax on IBM's DeveloperWorks site. There was a quote near the top of the page:

"When we were young, we were told that 'Everybody else is doing it' was a really stupid reason to do something. Now it's the standard reason for picking a particular software package." -- Barry Gehm

I agree that language popularity should not be the primary reason for picking a particular software package. Nor should how innovative and advanced it is. The primary reasons should be:

1. Suitability to particular software development task.
2. Effectiveness of developers with selected language.

Of course the 2nd point does take into account the popularity and how supported it is. If you cannot find any developers to work in a specific language, then it isn't a good choice no matter now suitable it is, unless the developers can become effective and productive quickly in the language.

Really the 1st point is the most important. Sure, the innovation and advancements in the language are important in this area too, but much less so then the other elements of its suitability.

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [Languages]

PDC 07 announced

PDC 07 (Professional Developer Conference) has finally been announced, Oct 2-5 in Las Angeles, California. Typically, this is the conference that Microsoft puts on when they have a bunch of new developer stuff to show off (like LINQ).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/PDC/

Looks like they are just in the planning stages so not much there yet. But if you haven't been to PDC before, or would like to see what the last one was like, you can see Channel 9's coverage of PDC 05 here: http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/pdc05.

Now I just have to figure out how to score some free tickets. :)

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Language Popularity ASP vs. PHP

Matt and I werediscussing the flexibility of PHP. I commented that I keep hearing everyone saying ASP/ASP.net is the best of the best for web development, but judging by the fruits of the internet I would say PHP is more popular and more powerful. I realize that judging its power based on popularity isn't accurate, but I think having such a large repository of available projects to leverage as well as sites dedicated to the language is a huge strength of a language.

Beyond an estimate based on observation, you can judge a language's popularity in three ways.

1. TIOBE Programming Community Index. Unfortunately it doesn't include ASP/ASP.net since it does not consider it an actual language. It does include PHP, and rates it quite highly at #5 (In other news, Delphi moved up to #9 in December!)
2. Google Fight, which compares the Google results of two search terms. It puts PHP as the winner with 2.7 million results vs. ASP with 1.7 million results.
3. Google Code Search, which is the latest in a long line of code search engines. It has 567,000 PHP code samples and only 400 ASP code samples.

TIOBE does a really good job in tracking language popularity. It would be interesting to see how they would rate ASP/ASP.net in comparison to PHP, but I suspect it would put PHP very high on the list. The final indicator of the value of a language is asking people who know both PHP and ASP/ASP.net. They all favor PHP over ASP/ASP.net.

Technorati Tags: [Programming] [Software] [PHP] [ASP.net] [ASP]

Got API?

Matt just sent me this site: www.GotApi.com. "It's indexed the API's of PHP, Javascript (DOM related only it looks like... of course thats the tough part anyway), HTML, and CSS."

Matt and I were discussing the popularity and power of PHP vs. ASP/ASP.net.

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