NYCPHP Meetup

[James Wetterau]

Adam Fields says:
> James Wetterau wrote:
> [...]
> > I also like the sense of comfort it gives you when plunging into
> > oddball tasks where no one's the expert, e.g. "Can you make this
> > 25-year-old unsupported APL program running on an old mainframe using
> > EBCDIC character encoding work correctly with data coming from a
> > custom VB COM component running on NT4 that interoperates with and
> > relies on stored procedures in a Sybase database hosted on SunOS
> > 4.1.4?  We upgraded the environment and something broke."  I enjoy
> > those kinds of questions.  There are no experts for that sort of
> > thing, and only breadth of experience really counts and really helps.
> 
> Hey! I wrote that! There was some FAME 4GL in there too...
> 
> Man, I hate APL.
...

I was actually creating a composite picture of some of the most, uh,
interesting projects that I and my colleagues (including you) have
worked on.  I don't think that exact combination ever showed up, but
every single one of the pieces, and several in combination, down to
EBCDIC - ASCII translation/communication with NT 4, has been a piece
of a project that I or my teammates working with me have dealt with.

APL seems to attract a "special" kind of programmer.  I'll never
forget some wildly beaming A-plus enthusiasts at Usenix handing me a
sticker for it.  (A-plus is an APL related/derivative/mutant offshoot
from Morgan Stanley.)  The sticker was in psychedelic colors and
letters and said "A-plus: Awk on Crack".  You just don't see that kind
of marketing much.

You can find out all about A-plus here:
http://www.aplusdev.org/

Here's a cool-looking example program:
http://www.aplusdev.org/About/unique.html

I always thought programming languages needed more Greek letters,
arrows, and math symbols.  PHP would really take off it it would only
start using them.  :-)