yelyah

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coding despair 20111012yelyah

yelyah - “coding despair 20111012” piano improv

I’m not really a programmer. I just keep seeming to do things that put me in that category… like programming.

But really, I’m an English major. Or a writer. Someone in love with written languages. Which I think explains why I’ve come to abhor languages like PHP and Perl and any other language that litters their code with semi-colons and curly braces and other stuff that to my eyes is just cruft.

Or maybe it’s my love of minimalism. Or my laziness. Or my love of beauty. If you’ve got my type of brain, you’ll look at the smarty vs php syntax and think that PHP is horribly verbose and obnoxious looking. And not terribly intuitive either.

And I bring all of this up because WordPress is something I keep sort of falling in love with. Until I start seeing the code of course.

I used to be a PHP person (even though of course I never call myself a programmer), which to me is why the hatred is so funny. Or maybe it’s that exact background with PHP that makes it so easy for me to hate on PHP because there are better tools out there now. Better is relative of course.

Overly long code increases the chance you’ll eff something up. It also greatly increases the difficulty of finding that eff up.

Still though, I’m drawn to WordPress. Once every 6 months or so. One of these days maybe I’ll just force myself to learn how to customize it just so I know if it’s worth it or not.

I’m also trying to learn it for a family member to know if it’s something that they should pursue or not. I’ll probably try to teach them my preferred route of ruby/haml/sass/compass/yaml/vim/iterm at some point but I tend to believe my tool set is too geeky for most.

But I’m still not a programmer.