I'd agree with the author that only logicians are interested in formal proofs.
But what the author describes as the Hilbet-Bourbaki method is simply what math is. Any mathematician will tell you that if you're not proving theorems then you're not really doing math.
Anyway, what good is a computer proof if it doesn't provide any insight ? (which is usually the case). A good proof usually illuminates why some mathematical statement is true, and that is why computer proofs are usually looked upon with suspicion by many mathematicians.
After all, a computer simply churning out the answer (42 ?) doesn't advance the state of human knowledge at all.
Brokers don't trade with their own money, they trade on behalf of clients.
They make a living by charging their clients a small commission for making the trade. Brokers make money when the market is going up, and they make when money the market is going down.
If your app isn't successful then there's nothing to worry about.
But what if your app is super successful? How would you ever be able to secure enough servers to meet the demand without burning a very deep hole in your pocket?
What we need is a Y-Combinator like incubator for Facebook Apps - a company which will host your app and help you scale it up for a chunk of equity.
I worked with Perl before PHP but never grew to like it (it's not consistent enough and not exactly easy on the eyes, either).
I do understand the tradeoff between efficiency and power, and PHP hits that sweet spot just right for web programming.
Worrying _too_ much about language efficiency when it comes to web programming is clearly a case of premature optimisation. PHP is efficient enough (probably Perl and Python as well, maybe not Ruby ?).
But PHP is not one of them, it's perfectly suited for the web. I personally find it easier to identify blub programmers than blub languages ...
As long as it resolves symbols (variable and function names) at run-time instead of compile-time, it can't be efficient.
That includes all dynamic languages i.e. Lisp, Ruby, Python, Perl, Smalltalk, JavaScript, Eiffel, Erlang, Forth, Lua et al.
No programming language is straight-forward unless you know all internals.
True, but as you say, that applies to any language. PHP is a very easy language for novices to pick up.
OOP ... gives nothing but an illusion of maintainability, while in reality you end up
In my experience OO code tends to be easier to maintain, and so long as you don't over do it, efficient.
Only good thing about PHP is that it's a dynamic language with dynamic strings and lists/arrays, it is embedded (in HTML) and is largely supported. And that's all you need for server programming on the Web.
That's why I recommended it as a good choice for web programming.
You might like to follow up with this:
http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/01_intro.html
Which is the introduction to this:
http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/TOC.html