Programming: July 2008 Archives
Part of what I do to seek pleasure is teaching some undergraduate students about the concepts of computer programming. While I try and explain the ideas which are in my mind, and pass them to the young developers out there in front of me, I often feel proud, so proud, that I am able to develop an interest level in them. I feel fascinated by the fact that the student is learning to program not because the student has to, but because the student wants to. That's something very important when you are starting to learn something, and it's always much more fun.
I've seen that the students like to ask questions that may have no logic in your world of things as a teacher - but extracting what they want from their questions and successfully delivering them back is a really rewarding exercise.
And every time I am the teaching assistant of a particular course, I end up finding some students who are really very promising - with great potential within them to lead the rest. I just love the way they approach things - the focus that they have when solving a problem. They're coding as if no one else is watching them, and I love it!
I don't know if it happens just with me, but I've noticed that I can tell by just looking at a person first time how good that person is, in any particular area they may be in. It's the charm of the personality such people have perhaps, that gives me such an impression straight away. Or I'm just lucky at making wild guesses.
It has happened a lot of times with me - that I have a look at a person - or just talk to that person once, and then in my mind I just get a certificate telling me that the person will make it big - will be a distinction or is already a distinction (even if i don't know). And after some time, I get to see that the person who I met has really excelled at all the things I thought s/he would excel at. And it's just so refreshing, and fun.
It's probably one great thing about great people: they won't tell you how great they are, but still you can't help but notice the charisma that they hold.
Thanks to God - it is one of the greatest of gifts to have from God - to be able to meet and know great people.
I've seen that the students like to ask questions that may have no logic in your world of things as a teacher - but extracting what they want from their questions and successfully delivering them back is a really rewarding exercise.
And every time I am the teaching assistant of a particular course, I end up finding some students who are really very promising - with great potential within them to lead the rest. I just love the way they approach things - the focus that they have when solving a problem. They're coding as if no one else is watching them, and I love it!
I don't know if it happens just with me, but I've noticed that I can tell by just looking at a person first time how good that person is, in any particular area they may be in. It's the charm of the personality such people have perhaps, that gives me such an impression straight away. Or I'm just lucky at making wild guesses.
It has happened a lot of times with me - that I have a look at a person - or just talk to that person once, and then in my mind I just get a certificate telling me that the person will make it big - will be a distinction or is already a distinction (even if i don't know). And after some time, I get to see that the person who I met has really excelled at all the things I thought s/he would excel at. And it's just so refreshing, and fun.
It's probably one great thing about great people: they won't tell you how great they are, but still you can't help but notice the charisma that they hold.
Thanks to God - it is one of the greatest of gifts to have from God - to be able to meet and know great people.
Whenever I read Rasmus Lerdorf, I feel amazingly blessed for that particular time of the day. This man is a true gentleman. I would assume you'd be pretty amazed when I call a geek a gentleman but he truly is. Lerdorf's writings are so very different and better from all the other "php experts" in terms of pleasure that one avails when reading.
I, for one, had lately become a language purist complaining why PHP doesn't have a much more organized structure for some of the things. And in this article, Rusmus seems to have read my mind. He answers those questions beautifully and emphasizes that PHP was never meant to be the Goddes of beautiful code structure, it was just a mistress that solved the Web problem.
Here is an extract from article that would make the point clear:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/php_experts/rasmus_php.html
The interesting thing to note is that he answered this very question of mine about the lack of formalized structure to some of the things in PHP quite a while ago (somewhere in 2004 to be precise). A genius isn't a genius for no reason and mashaAllah Rasmus is definitely one of them. Looking at the amount of stuff he has written, it seems to me that he is not much of a talker, which reminds me of the line I once read in the beautiful PHP Manual: Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk!
I, for one, had lately become a language purist complaining why PHP doesn't have a much more organized structure for some of the things. And in this article, Rusmus seems to have read my mind. He answers those questions beautifully and emphasizes that PHP was never meant to be the Goddes of beautiful code structure, it was just a mistress that solved the Web problem.
Here is an extract from article that would make the point clear:
"What it all boils down to is that PHP was never meant to win any beauty contests. It wasn't designed to introduce any new revolutionary programming paradigms. It was designed to solve a single problem: the Web problem. That problem can get quite ugly, and sometimes you need an ugly tool to solve your ugly problem. Although a pretty tool may, in fact, be able to solve the problem as well, chances are that an ugly PHP solution can be implemented much quicker and with many fewer resources. That generally sums up PHP's stubborn function-over-form approach throughout the years."
Here is the link to the article:http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/php_experts/rasmus_php.html
The interesting thing to note is that he answered this very question of mine about the lack of formalized structure to some of the things in PHP quite a while ago (somewhere in 2004 to be precise). A genius isn't a genius for no reason and mashaAllah Rasmus is definitely one of them. Looking at the amount of stuff he has written, it seems to me that he is not much of a talker, which reminds me of the line I once read in the beautiful PHP Manual: Those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk!
