Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Or should that be, “Learning Eclipse with Java”, as I suppose there are people out there who know Java and want to know what using Eclipse is like. There may also be people who are interested in the particular issue of class inheritance and calling objects from one class defined in the superclass, so I don’t want to limit the audience of this post too much. My main motivation for this post, however, is a desire to see Java taught right, which is an ambitious goal, I know, especially as it implies that I and everyone I know was taught incorrectly. Perhaps I should settle for “Java taught differently”, and this can be an experiment to test my hypothesis that people shouldn’t have to scale the learning curve mountain before they can write a line of Java, they should use all the shortcuts at their disposal to get to the summit, and then enjoy the ride down the other side as soon as possible. The main shortcut I can see, apart from just ignoring the formal theory behind the language until you’ve actually seen it in action, is to get Eclipse to tell you what you can do, and settle for knowing which option is right.

I like to think of myself as experienced in many computer languages, even if some of those experiences are unpleasant, and what better example of the variety of languages (and experiences) than PHP and Ruby. It seems that everyone skilled in one those languages has a strong preference for one or the other, so perhaps it would be helpful for me to contribute a comparison of how the two languages can be used to solve the same problem. My personal opinion is that while Ruby (and Rails sites) may fail spectacularly, PHP sites fail based on the quality of the programmer, and there are more PHP programmers out there (with a wider range of abilities) to pick bad examples of code from. Really, though, this blog post (and my whole blog) should not be about wading into the current argument of the day, and Ruby has its places and I’m happy to use it in those places, so I should make it clear that the comparison below is to aid interoperability. This was in fact what motivated me to write this code, actually, as there was a web service that needed implementing in both languages and the implementations were disagreeing on how the zipping stage should work. There are also a couple of gotchas just getting either language to zip or pack something, so hopefully the example code will be useful for someone trying to spot a bug in their own code.