Monthly Archives: August 2008

Development language preferences are funny things. I’m well aware of the benefits that come from being familiar with many languages, not least of which is the perspective needed to discern the right tool for each job. As they say, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I’ve had exposure (in varying degrees) to a fair number of programming languages in my time: BASIC, Pascal, Ada, C, Bourne Shell, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, Javascript, VB, and Ruby among them, so I feel as though I do have some general ideas about the kinds of features I look for in a language.

All that being said, there are some tools that I can’t help but wonder about. PHP is one of them.
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If you’ve been coding for a while, particularly if you spend much time with the agile development crowd, you’ve probably heard the term YAGNI, or “You Ain’t Gonna Need It.” Simply put, this principle states that we shouldn’t spend time adding features or flexibility that you don’t need right now, because it’s likely that you ain’t gonna need it later, either. I recently purchased Russ Olsen’s excellent book, , in which he makes one of the most eloquent and succinct arguments for YAGNI I’ve yet seen.
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