Marcin Juszkiewicz - php

Programming languages

2021-09-13T18:02:00+02:00

Today is Programmer’s Day. 13 years ago I wrote a post “Am I programmer” where I defined myself more as Developer than Programmer.

Wikipedia definition of “Programmer” says:

A computer programmer, sometimes called a software developer, a programmer or more recently a coder (especially in more informal contexts), is a person who creates computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computers or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.

I still do not write software used directly by users — I usually build someone else’s software. But I used to do write programs and sometimes like to do something. In some programming language and I had a chance to use many of them.

BASIC

Probably most of people born in 70s started their experience with programming using BASIC on 8bit computers. If you were out of luck you could end with Commodore 64 and it’s “PET BASIC” without any way to make use of audio/video capabilities of computer.

I used Atari 65XE. First original Atari BASIC, then moved to Turbo BASIC XL (was faster and better). I wrote several programs in my teenager years. Enhanced some of them with short routines written in 6502 assembler.

Once moved to Amiga and then PC I had two times when BASIC knowledge helped. During studies one of teachers knew only GW-BASIC so we had to write programs using it. Other time was some kind of BASIC on PIC 16F84 microcontroller.

Oh, and I wrote my first 8k intro in something resembling BASIC.

Assembler

Going lower in programming stack… During Atari years I learnt a bit of MOS 6502 assembly. Once moved to Amiga had quick lesson of m68k programming. Used it to understand how “Happy New Year! 96” virus was working. Then wrote simple tool (using High Speed Pascal compiler) to kill it in all infected binaries. Some months later I got antivirus software which did it properly.

During studies we had lot of Zilog Z80 assembly. Mostly on some old controllers from some unnamed milk company (20 keys, 8 places of 7-segment display, ADC/DAC etc.). But, as I know how to drawing block diagrams, I always had beer from other students ;D One day someone brought something weird instead of Z80 code. Turned out it was 16-bit x86 code. Took me a few minutes of reading (it was simple program).

Then came first real MCU: PIC 16F84. First we programmed it in BASIC (it was weird), then C and finally assembly. Small amount of instructions, simple names — was fun to program.

I never learnt x86-64 or ARM assembly. There was no need.

LOGO

Oh, LOGO… And turtle drawings. On Atari you could have 4 (or 5) turtles drawing at same time.

I even tried to write some simple game in LOGO. But need of calling garbage collecting too often made it worthless.

It is also first language where I wrote code for someone on piece of paper. And it worked.

C/C++

Some people would split them into two, but not me. I learnt them in a way that I wrote some of my programs in pure C, some in some form of C++ etc. Depends on needs.

During studies some programs were first written in pure C on my Amiga. Then I used someone’s PC to add Windows UI to it (Borland C Builder mostly). My master thesis was kind of terrible C and I am not proud of it.

My probably most complicated application is my module player. I never released it despite spending about 13 years on it (from time to time). Used it to learn Qt programming a bit.

Pascal

I learnt Turbo Pascal in a school. A bit. Never wrote anything complex in this language. Used it few times on Amiga.

One lab during studies involved Pascal programming. I wrote code, someone reviewed it and we run it. Robot which we were supposed to control went crazy and demolished room a bit. After simple fix we repeated and all went as supposed.

During last year I played a bit with Mad-Pascal for Atari XL/XE (cross compiler runs on Windows or Linux). Maybe there will be something from it one day.

AmigaE

During my Amiga years I wanted to have some way of programming. No one from my friends had any C compiler, Pascal was not popular so I went with AmigaE.

It was strange language. Kind of Pascal, kind of C. Allowed to mix assembly with AmigaE in one file.

But compiler was fast and worked on 1MB machine (I had hard drive). All includes (called ‘modules’) were pre-compiled so building application was quick.

I used it to write several applications. Released one of them in shareware model — full copy costed 5 USD (or 5 PLN for Poland). At the end of development I had about 100 users. It paid for some of my Amiga hardware.

PHP

After studies, when I had fresh Masters in Automation and Robotics, I had to decide which way to go. Turned out that my SQL knowledge from work done during previous years can be used. Just had to learn PHP.

After 2 weeks of learning language I was at test period in one portal. And became ‘main programmer’ there. Not because I knew PHP better then the other guy. I was good at organizing work, sorting out project into steps etc. And being GNU/Linux user I had some knowledge useful to be ‘second after admin’.

I worked in few companies writing PHP code. For several customers. And after about 6 years I dropped it and went into Embedded Linux territory.

Nowadays I officially lack any knowledge of PHP language.

Python

Another “P” language… I started using Python in 2004. Right after I found OpenEmbedded as most of it’s code was (still is) Python.

So for 17 years I am repeating that “one day I will learn Python properly” :D

This is my favourite programming language. Used it in OpenEmbedded, OpenStack, this blog and countless projects. Nowadays if I have to write some script then most of time it is in Python.

Minimal version I target is still 3.6 as this is what RHEL 8 uses.

Shell

Scripts. When not in Python then in shell. Most of time I use Bash. It works, I do not use most of it’s features.

I can write scripts in plain POSIX shell. Not of fan but can. Some lessons learnt from years of working in embedded Linux area.

Perl

When “P” languages are mentioned, Perl has to be present. Never learnt it. Had to maintain some scripts in Perl in past. I even managed to make some improvements to them but no idea was it in proper way. It worked.

Forth

Reverse Polish Notation is crazy. It feels like source code written by master Yoda. I got Forth in Atari times and tried to write something. Probably never went behind ‘hello world’ ;D

Java

Never learnt. In past I found farm bot code for Ingress game. In Java. Took the code, expanded it, added several improvements. It worked fine. But became harder and harder to expand.

So I rewrote it in Python 3 and forgot about Java.

Javascript

Just no. Like PHP.

Other ones

During years of building and porting software I had a chance to write something in several less popular languages. Erlang, Haskell, Rake, Ruby etc.

Most of time it was something just a bit more complex than ‘hello world’ — to check does compiler/interpreter work.

Am I programmer?

2008-05-10T10:10:00+02:00

Many people think that I am programmer… But what is definition of programmer?

Wikipedia says: “A programmer is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.”

My last desktop program was Multiview for AmigaOS 2.04+ which ended life in 2000 year (after over 3 years of development). Then I changed platform to Debian GNU/Linux and started to mainly use software instead of writing it. Of course during studies I wrote some code in few languages (C, C++, Z80 Asm, PIC16 Asm/C/BASIC and maybe some other) but none of them was something to be used by normal people.

For few years my work title was “PHP programmer” (with some variants) but writing code for websites is different thing then for desktop computers.

Eric Sink wrote one day great post about programmers and developers. According to this I am rather developer then programmer.

My programmer part of me know how to fix code written in PHP (used this language for few years to get paid), Python (but never got proper amount of knowledge about it) and few others — one day I had to debug small application written in 8086 assembler which I saw for first time — and all I had was source code printout.

But I also many times worked with clients to get informations what they really need to be done in project and those discussions changed many aspects of first draft of specifications. Then transforming specs into design and finally into code which gives working service at the end. Providing help to few ~60 years old ladies which use CMS written by you can be hard job — especially when documentation is not yet created so no one else know each system parts.

But there are many work titles to choose from: Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Software (Engineer / Architect / Developer / Designer) so I probably will stay with Developer and will not try to explain too much what exactly I am doing for living :)

Last day at Conecto

2007-01-31T09:36:00+01:00

Today is last day of my work for Conecto. I decided to bake a cake for this occassion (to bake something other then bits which I usually bake with bitbake) but oven in our kitchen is hard to control so it got burnt and I decided to not take it to work.

Burnt cake

Hopefully there are cake shops around so I will be able to buy something instead.

Aurox - the other way to Linux on desktop

2006-09-26T20:13:00+02:00

Today I again had to work on getting customer server working for website which we did at work. Since my last visit machine was replaced from crappy Celeron 333MHz with 128M ram and 2G SCSI harddrive — all under 5 years old Red Hat with 2.4.2 kernel — to dual p3/700 with 1G ram and much larger harddrive. It also got updated distribution but something a bit newer — Aurox 10.1 with 2.6.9 kernel.

Remote logged as root looks weird.. all shells with # — but if admin is lazy or do not know how to create user accounts…

The worst thing was that I had to be an admin there to get all LAMP components working in required versions. Now machine is building newer PHP from source because finding something on Aurox website is like looking into /dev/null ;( No informations for older releases, no public bugtracker, two misc forums (newer one treat my Firefox as WAP browser) — nightmare…

But it is nice to find that RPM based distros got some tools to fetch packages from network other then wget ;)

MediaWiki is crap?

2006-05-09T14:25:00+02:00

Today I tried to install MediaWiki on one of servers and failed. This monster need memory_limit set to atleast 20M or will fail. Target system has it set to 8M and everything which is hosted there works fine. All I got from MediaWiki installer was memory allocation failed and it died.

There is no way to install this other then this web based something which does not work… Crap

4 years of work as PHP programmer

2005-08-31T20:33:00+02:00

Today I noticed that 4 years ago I started work at Polnet SA in Wrocław, Poland as PHP programmer. It was times of PHP 4.0.4 when register_globals was normal thing, when using short_tags (< ? ?>) was something which does not bothered me (today it conflict with XML).

Now portal for which I wrote most of code exist in other form, many sections was removed, not all work — time passed, company died.