Fact: a vast majority of programmers in adult are entirely incompetent

50 incompetent mofos

I read the screen shots of the post and you told the guy you would get to it in a few days. After a few days you should have contacted him and told him you were not going to do it.

You told him to wait and he did.

It was then up to you to tell him to stop waiting.

What if you had started it in a few days, then finished and contacted him and he said "Oh, sorry man, I didn't wait, I had someone else do it so I don't need what you worked on". You would be pissed, right?

I'm a self taught web developer.. not a programmer. However I do have some training (schooling only without the school) from other developers.
As you said, there's a mighty fine difference between a developer (scripter) and an actual programmer.

I have "banged off" a few apps in C# using Visual Basic Express but nothing much beyond that as I've never had the time to devote to learning it properly.

Real programmers are a breed apart from everyone else. I never had the patience to spend 14 hours crawling over code, locked in a dark back office sucking down Doctor Pepper like it's water. I also like the sun.

Well, 35 years in systems & programming at a bunch of $1+Billion companies. A couple of honors degree. Another $250k in additional training, and still going.

I dont' really work in web stuff, but, have learned PHP to go along with the other dozen or so languages that I have worked with over the years.

I agree with Libertine that a lot them burn out by the time they are 35(or moved up into management). Most only got in for the money anyways. There are only a few like myself(maybe 2-5%) that actually enjoy it, and don't go the management route. Been a manager a few times, and I get bored trying to figure out how many pencils I have to budget for, etc. Although putting me under MBAs working as Project Leaders with no programming experience is just inviting me to take them out to the parking lot.

As Warchild pointed out, there are some pretty complex stuff that the larger companies have had time to develope. Also there are Enterprise packages that are 100s of millions of lines of code. This stuff doesn't run on PCs though. Figure $20 million for hardware, plus another $10 million for software.

Things like bit sorts, etc. are still used a quite a bit. Terrabyte data mines need all the performance you can get. A neighbor also does machine language game programming. He has to fight off the companies wanting to hire him.

Also, I've seen newbies load everything into tables and then try to update with them. Nice way to get into multiple cross locks. Actually had a college stop teaching that stuff, because we don't allow it out in the real world.

Warchild:
On high access files(Client Master, etc.) you might want to look into DB fragmentation. Split your master file into different files based on how often each field is accessed. Use joining or extra reads to pick up the additional info only as needed.

For huge transaction files try partitioning so that each user/date gets a new file. Creates a zillion files, but you just enumerate the required files as you need them for consolidated stuff. You can also pickup some performance by arranging Ifs/Cases in the most often used order.

I've been at it so long that I even do systems when I'm out in the pub hitting on the females.

any of you high end programmers want to do a well paid, interesting project hit me up on icq 2417874

This is very true. I was being mostly facetious; as anyone doing anything so streamlined in the adult industry likely isn't writing it in PHP.

It's funny how I notice the "real programmers" here noting that php is lame and this and that. Just shows how little you do know about PHP. PHP is coded in C# by the way...may want to think about that long and hard.

Who said it's lame? It's good for what it does.

Heh, glad to see you on your toes. I wasn't directing that one to you. I just noticed a few others here mentioning that it's "just a scripting language"...when it surely is not.

Isn't the PHP interpretor coded in "C" or something like that? I always thought "C sharp" was an MS thing. Or am I getting my acronyms all twisty again?

Haha ouch. Sorry I meant og C, not sharp. Doh. lol

Jace you are one of the biggest flakes on GFY... you should not be speaking on the subject...

Fuck man... If those damn "interpretors" would just accept the code how I wrote it, a missing ";" wouldn't be an issue. I blame all my wasted web development error debugging on engineers making shit too complicated ;) -- It's a semi-colon for god's sake. Sorry. !!!!!!

j/k... kind of.

You can keep the Doc Pepper - but 14 hours is just the start of the day - love it

As long as other humans stay out of the way and don't distract (that costs 30 mins trying to find out what you were doing) - it's nice to inject levels of 'intelligence' into code and make it useful.

Tho sure would not be doing it for $30-$50/hour - that's not even a biz.

Tut tut - don't blame the compiler

PHP is a set of routines written in C that usurps other third party libraries written in C and creates a hodgepodge system of bizarrely named routines which usually do things, but sometimes don't do what you expect, depending on the release, the day of the week, the season, phase of the moon, et al..

Perl used to be, but it's been capable of rewriting itself, in itself, for quite a few years, now.

perl sucks...

GA, what scripting language / framework would you use to build a website?

It really depends on the task at hand. I do use and support PHP, but I don't pretend that it always does things intelligently. For instance, PHP uses literals (as does C) for defines, such as:

TRUE = 1
FALSE = 0

This creates problems when it doesn't define (or care) about the data, wether it's a string, or a numeric. For instance: strpos.

If you have:

It would say 'h' not found in 'hello', because the 'h' is at the beginning, or offset 0, which also means FALSE to PHP.

In C you get around this by declaring data types, but with PHP you have to use the '===' test directive, which is basically a really lame way of saying 'if this literally means the same as that'.

There's plenty of strange things with different functions as libraries, and PHP have grown over the years - sometimes a function is binary safe, so you can pass anything, other times, you can only use strings. It's messy, but it's getting better.

Hahaha...

I'm not a school-taught anything (well, journalism / creative writing), but I hate that shit myself; putting in triple equals sometimes to test a false is retarded compared to double equal.

I only deal with building websites. Personally, I find it difficult, sometimes, to try and find the right "framework" for my task at hand. There's PHP frameworks to help make my duties more efficient (smarty, off the top of my head) and there's Java ones ( spring, off the top of my head). Plus a bazillion others, such as Ruby on Rails -- one I've played with a little and though I hate saying the moniker of "R.O.R", I do dig how quick a website can be prototyped with it.

Anyway, all that shit aside, I think there's a disconnect between how laymen refer to those who do work by using terms like "programmer" / "coder" / "whatever".

In the end of my babble .... Grouchy, thanks for hooking up Wolfy.

That's does not look like an error or anything strange to me.
I don't do php, so tell me if I'm wrong:

You tested for the "string position" of "h" and it retuned position zero, which means it was found!! The first index of a string is "0", so it found "h" in the very first index of the string "hello".

Then you do a boolean test on the result for the "echo", correct?.

You can only do a boolean test of a result that will return either 0 or 1 and nothing else.

Change the "h" to "o"

$testfor="o";
$test=strpos($data, $testfor);

And it returns "4" right?

If the "h" was not found then the function either returns "-1" or "string::nopos", right?

Neither of those are boolean values.

Your example doesn't illustrate a problem with php, instead it illustrates that you tried to do a boolean test on a non-boolean result.

Right???

The problem is not programmers. I bet there are plenty good programmers around here.
The reason why flakes are always brought to discussion is because of
the cheap webmasters.
I've had several gfy'ers shit themselfs when they hear $60/h quotes
so they naturally get the cheaper coder and come back to complain
on gfy few weeks later.

Flakes exist only because theres a market for cheap programmers
that do a half assed job.

I agree,if he didnt want to do it. He should of just told him, its very simple.

Not quite. For PHP, anything that isn't 0 is considered to be legitimate. I used a ternary operator because I love 'em.

Another way of writing it would be if ($test != FALSE) { echo "Found." } else { echo "Not found." }

See the link on strpos above; my shorthand was a little difficult to read if you're not familiar with the nuances of PHP, but it's valid.

It's precisely the same, only with more text in it. As noted, 0 has the same value as FALSE, so unless you explicitly test for it, you can have nasty results.

QFT.

You are already destined to fail and you are already losing money if you even consider hiring a programmer for under 100/hr to create and maintain something critical to your business.

haha, true
tell that to the gfy crowd though
they like it cheap even if it fails once in a while

As a rule of thumb, I find that it's a bit difficult to take someone seriously when they're running mission critical applications on a virtual server.

Cash is king, and the cheaper, the better. So what if the car catches fire once in awhile. Wait, no, cars are worth paying for..

It's precisely the same in the sense that both methods are completly wrong.

If you program in C, then you know that strpos is not a boolean function.
It MAY return a boolean value but it will also return an interger which is 0 ,
which is confused as boolean zero. But, in this fuction, zero is not a boolean value yet you tried to evaluate it at as such.

You have to tell php that you want to perform an incongruent comparison by using the "===" operator.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congruent

See zero and FALSE are not EQUAL but the are congruent!
The "===" says "ignore congruence" and find exact equivalency to
FALSE.

See you can read all the stuff you want on the internet but it obvioulsy can't replace my education that a boolean function returns either zero or one.
If it returns anything else then don't do a boolean test on it.

I didn't know php had "===" but I still would have gotten it right because the code you did is just wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong and I would have never written that, because I know what a boolean value is.

I never wrote even one line of php code and I saw that right away in your example. But yet you still can't see that.

http://us2.php.net/strpos

The manual tells you that.
I told you that.

I never read the manual until 5 mins ago and already knew that.

But you don't want to hear that.

Which proves one thing.

Progammers may not be incompetent, but they sure are
Fucking Hard Headed



So I back down on my "self taught programmer can write good code" statement.

Go to fucking college like I did.