The Adventures of Emacs the Viking

Well, I've just spent the last half an hour reading the release notes for PHP 7.1 alpha, and in particular the changes regarding the use of array short-form syntax, that's '[]' to you and me. My lasting impression what that: other scripting languages already do this so PHP is only playing catch-up. Lisp Once again, a language proudly announces a "new" feature that actually already exists half a century ago in Lisp. One day we will all realise that Lisp is actually more productive than "ECMA script based language foo" and start using it. Lisp For all of its wondrous capabilities, Lisp still suffers from a seemingly snobby community that eschews anything remotely close to a "noob" question at times and it can be hard to get to grips with because as yet, apart from Slime and Emacs, there is still a lack of decent IDE support. There's been a lot of discussion recently on the Lispworks forums about tarting up the appearance of ...

This is another article in my attempts to find new ways of looking at PHP and making it less of a chore to type in all that code. As much as I love PHP I hate wasting keystrokes. More typing is more errors is more grief. Being an off and on user of Lisp, although not as much as I used to, one of the things that I always liked in Lisp was the ability to be able to return multiple values from a function at once using (values) and then marry that with (multiple-value-bind) to create convenient named bindings for whatever you were about to do. I recently found myself wanting to return a couple of values from a helper function and I just didn't want to go to the trouble of having to type all those character required to create an array with keys for the two values and then I remembered MVB and a little light went on in my head! If somebody else has already done this then I apologise up front but it was new to me and I haven't seen it anywhere else so this could be a first! ...

I decided recently, while starting a new project, that it would be interesting to try and take some of my new found paradigms from Haskell back into the relative slums of PHP. As much as I like the fact that PHP just works, the more I get into Haskell the more I resent having to type reams and reams of code in PHP just to get things done. That's just me and I won't change! One of the things that I am really starting to miss now that I understand Monads (at least enough to write them and use them, my own and the libraries) is the ability to be able to have "Maybe". It is such a lovely way of handling data when there really isn't anything and it sure as hell kicks ass over using "NULL" as a return type. PHP is riddled with functions that return FALSE to mean they didn't actually work or some other value if they did which makes a whole mockery of its so called "types". Case in point, when using PDO for example (I could be w...

I recently had the task of learning how to implement our internal company PHP coding standards documents which exist only as a set of JIRA pages into something that could be integrated into the subversion pre-commit checking phase so that not only does code have to be syntax error free, it now also has to adhere to the coding standards. I remembered reading about PHP_CodeSniffer (PCS) and volunteered to "have a look" and see if I could implement one of the more simpler standards, our variable naming convention, as a starter exercise. Well, after the mandatory head-banging and spike in coffee consumption that accompanies learning new stuff, I became very impressed by the way that PCS actually does what it does. It builds upon the token_get_all()   function and creates not just an array of tokens and there positions but it also figures out (I read the source for half an hour!) which bits of code are contained within other bits of code; in other words the context within which...

Having now released my own programming language, FELT , and learned a lot about this and that in the process I have of late, in the evenings, been struggling to reconcile my love of LISP and how simple FELT makes some PHP coding task leaner and meaner with the fact that I still have to use PHP for my day job. In my language, FELT , I have used the square brackets to define a "normal" array and curly braces to define a "key-value" array, mainly because this is identical to JSON format and anybody familiar with Javascript coding just won't have any issues getting to grips with that now will they! Let's take some simple examples of FELT code: (defvar simple-array [1 2 3 4]) (defvar simple-map {:name "Eric" :age 42 :occupation "Viking Hacker"}) When FELT has done its thing, we get the following PHP code, $simple_array = array(1, 2, 3, 4); $simple_map = array('name' => "Eric", 'age' => 42, ...

Writing a WordPress plugin this time, as Fletcher might have said, "You wanna stay away from nonces Gobber, bad news they are." My code had created a meta-box to allow me to tick / untick a simple check-box against pages and posts so that I could restrict content to registered users. Every time I hit the "update" button I got the lovely little error box telling me there was a problem saving my post and to try again. Thanks WP, very helpful. Anyway, I tracked the problem to a piece of code that I had transcribed incorrectly from the WP codex page, don't ask me why I hadn't cut and pasted it directly from the page as I normally do, but here's what I had and what I should have had, first the bad code... wp_nonce_field(   plugin_basename(     __FILE__, ' tnjpay_restricted_nonce'   ), ); and the correct code is... wp_nonce_field(   plugin_basename(__FILE__),   'tnjpay_restricted_nonce' ); Simple, but in the cut-an...