[OFF-TOPIC] How do I find a mentor when no one I work with knows what they are doing?

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2014 at 3:19 AM, alister
<alister.nospam.ware at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 09 Apr 2014 01:48:52 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote:
>
>> I managed to convince him to let me use Pike for a lot of the work,
>> though I suspect that - now that we're no longer working together -
>> he's ripping a lot of it out in favour of either PHP or JavaScript.
>> And that's a job I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy.
>>
>> ChrisA
>
> Why was your code that bad? ;-)

It was idiomatic Pike code, which is in many ways similar to idiomatic
Python (definitely not exactly, but I'm guessing you're not familiar
with Pike, so just pretend I'd written a good few KLOC of idiomatic
Python). The code is expressive; in just a handful of lines, I can do
bulk operations on entire arrays of values, and I can comfortably run
callbacks efficiently, and (this part wouldn't work so easily in
Python) on a SIGHUP, the code would smoothly switch over to the latest
version on the disk, without breaking any currently-processing work.
Now try rewriting that in PHP (or serverside JavaScript - probably
node.js or something - but he hadn't gone anywhere beyond the "vague
theory" stage with server JS, so PHP is more likely). Bear in mind
that you have to handle multiple concurrent network connections, so
you need to do either piles of threads/processes or asynchronous I/O
(the Pike code used the latter).

So, yeah. My code would make for terrible PHP. :) One day, out of
morbid curiosity, I might try SSHing into one of the boxes to see
whether any of the accounts are still there for which I know the
passwords. (I was the primary network admin, so I knew the passwords
for a lot of obscure accounts on obscure servers.) Would be
interesting to see what's going on there. But more than likely the
project's dead in the water. It's highly unlikely he'll find a decent
programmer willing to work for the low wages I was getting there, and
even less likely that he'll have the time to do it all on his own.

ChrisA