2007-07-08

New Life for PHP

I have been a PHP 4 programmer, and a rather disapointed one, I might say.
I come from a Java OO design patterns background, and my entering into the PHP world some years ago was self-forced, mainly because it was (and is) such an ubiquitous language, and also because getting something off the ground was quite easy.

I have been watching the whole ruby and rails thing grow with quite some enthusiasm, and have been trying it out, and even used it on a "real" project.

I know PHP 5 has been around for quite some time, but I only dug into it a couple ou months ago, and I can say that the new version, with java-like method declarations and exceptions has breath a new life into a otherwise aging and spaghetted-out language.

I also know PHP is still not fully object oriented as rails but, in my experience, its runtime environment is quite faster that ruby, and there are a lot of programmers out there not ready to give it up.

Check this out

You will be seeing some new interesting applications and frameworks coming out of this language. Maybe one by yours truly!

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2007-07-06

Companies are disposable in the US: fear in Europe

Reading Paul Grahams essay "Why not start a startup", I came into a paragraph where he analyses why the fear of incertainty should not drive you not to start a startup:

No one will blame you if the startup tanks, so long as you made a serious effort.
[...]
Nor will investors hold it against you, as long as you didn't fail out of laziness or incurable stupidity. I'm told there's a lot of stigma attached to failing in other places—in Europe, for example. Not here. In America, companies, like practically everything else, are disposable.


Americans are not fearful of failure. Is this fact different in Europe?
Has this anything to do with the post World War II Europe? With the generally conservative and social aware mindset?