I have documented my experience using an Agent for a slightly different task -- upgrading framework version -- I had to abandon the work, but, my learning has been similar what is in the post.
Great points! But, it can get pretty lonely to have your lunch alone - sometimes even depressing. I tend to have lunch with 1 or 2 of the closest of workmates whenever I can.
It is almost impractical for me to be like Stallman and shun a lot of Hardware/Software. But, I do not wish for Stallman to be any less radical than he is as: by being radical he gains my attention and some of his thoughts and ideas stick with me and, it has made me think about 'freedom' while buying any piece of Hardware/Software.
I would never want to work him on anything - I watched him tear apart people while responding to their concerns - but, people like him are essential to the Free Software movement.
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
But, I don't mind it all as I get to read views and firsthand accounts from fellow hackers that is much different from what I see on TV.
Things like "stat cache" and "memory leaks" are what I watch out for when I write command line scripts in PHP. Also, I do not run my scripts as a daemon and I make sure that they do not run for more than a set maximum execution time.
So yeah, it may not be the most perfect choice but, it beats : having to learn another language when I know what to look out for when I write a command line script in PHP.
Stupid was a bit too strong, but, I stand by what I said based on my experience. Articles like these exist partly because of the belief that PHP programmers in general are not competent. You do not hear such frequent rumbling on Python and it's practitioners. One could apply the same O(N)and O(k>>N) logic there as IMO, Python is not harder to learn/program in compared with PHP.
I use PHP at work for creating not only web applications but, also to do a lot of non-user facing backend stuff. It's great to know that someone out there is using PHP at a much bigger scale for backend stuff.I hope he shares more technical details. If you don't like PHP, fine, but, don't think all PHP programmers are stupid.
I once had a Python programmer looking at the kind of stuff that I was doing with PHP and he was surprised that such things could be done in PHP.
This is an actual conversation that I had in a meetup:
Guy1: If PHP were to disappear, it would bring down a lot of the web with it, wouldn't it?
Guy2: Nah, but, that would be the case if Java or .net were to disappear.
Me: (to myself)Wtf!
Guy1: But, most of the links that I click on the web end with .php.