NYCPHP Meetup

[Fee, Patrick J (US SSA)]

As a Lifetime Baseball fan (married over home plate back in 2000), career-long web-programmer (I remember when NYPHP was first getting started), and long time stalker of this list, I second Kristina's "Love It".

As programmers, we spend a lot of time using metaphors to explain what we are doing in a way easily understood by others. I've even explained the ins-and-outs of MX records by using a "delivery to an upscale apartment building" metaphor.  But the baseball metaphor and Tao reference are best I've seen in a while... both for their simplicity and universal (at least in North America) appeal.

And to think that I overlooked the original posting.  Thanks Kristina.
Thanks for making my Friday interesting.


Patrick J. Fee
Manager, Systems Engineering Services
BAE Systems Technology Solutions & Services
Cel: (240) 401-6820
Fax: (301) 231-2635
Patrick.Fee at BAESystems.com


-----Original Message-----
From: talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org [mailto:talk-bounces at lists.nyphp.org] On Behalf Of Kristina D. H. Anderson
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 12:08 PM
To: NYPHP Talk
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] Need help understanding NULL

References to baseball AND the Tao in a PHP post about NULL!  Love it!!

Kristina

PS Also a jQuery fan here.

-----Original Message----- 
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:08 AM, <sequethin at gmail.com wrote:
 
[...] the way I think of it is, NULL simply means no value at all. 0 and 
boolean false and '' are values, for sure; NULL is, um, null. As for concrete examples, in baseball there are those two-row tables -- one for the 
away and one for the home team -- with columns for each of the nine innings. 
Before the game begins, what are the values in each of those fields?
 
 Problems can arise in PHP because if you var_dump($foo) and it's 
NULL, is that because it was never set, or because it was explicitly set to 
NULL? Or is it because you are referring to global that's out of scope because you're inside a function? PHP doesn't care because it's NULL in either case. If you have an $object and accidently lapse into French and type $objet-doSomething(), your program will puke because $objet is 
likewise NULL. (Assuming for the sake of the example that you haven't actually assigned an object to $objet)
  
As for Javascript, the days of "I hate it" are behind us. You gotta 
do it, like it or not, in this brave new web 2.0 world. Fortunately we have 
an ample selection of quality frameworks to choose from, all of which, apparently, have peculiarities sufficiently irksome to some programmer,
 whose Hubris and Impatience greatly exceed her or his Laziness, so 
that she will write yet another one, and cast of characters grows larger. I'm a humble consumer, myself, and I'm liking JQuery.
 
 -- 
 David Mintz
 http://davidmintz.org/
 
 The subtle source is clear and bright
 The tributary streams flow through the darkness
 
 




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