ureadit

For the past several days, I’ve been working on an internal website for my company. I wrapped up work on a Content Management System that we use for our newsletters, and now I’m working on a simple budget tracking system. I’m not inclined to continuously write software where I can purchase it instead, but I often find that my company’s internal software requirements are very small and simple – too small and simple for commercial software, but too complicated to do everything manually. The result is something I call “smallware.” It fits in that niche between doing everything manually and having a commercial software package doing it for you. It is in this area that I create a number of programs – something I find fun and satisfying.

Anyway, at the end of the day today, I looked back and had a sudden realization. The code I’d been writing was actually a hybrid mixture of four different languages, all living peacefully within the same file, working cooperatively together to produce the results I needed. It’s a wonder that, with all that complexity, the stuff actually works. Web programmers have to feel comfortable maneuvering in and out of different coding languages to get something done.

For example, today I used HTML, PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. Each has its own purpose:

There are more languages that are typically used, including:

A good web programmer should be fluent in a majority of these languages, for each one has a place in developing most websites.

The problem is that each one of these languages represents a separate discipline of thought, and it takes time to build expertise in each. To make matters worse, in a lot of cases, such as JavaScript, different browsers have slightly different opinions on how to execute code, so what works for one browser may not work for another. To be completely web-ready, developers need to test functionality of all their code with all the major browsers. This is a daunting task indeed, which is why you sometimes see websites that say things like, “Best when viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer.” It basically says that the web developers did not have enough time or resources to test with other browsers, and if you use something other than the advertised browser, your browser may crash.

I admit, I’m not really making a point with this blog entry. I’m only acknowledging the complexity we humans have built for ourselves. The Internet is permeating society and is a real cultural game-changer, but what amazes me the most is that the Internet is, at its core, a very complicated beast. I’m constantly in a state of fascination that it actually works at all!

Best,

Dan

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