At 6:30am this morning I found myself sat at a computer with an instant messaging window open, debugging PHP code for a friend on the west coast of America. After whoops and cheers on the other end of the connection, we reminisced that I had been “quite good at this stuff” once upon a time.

Another friend reflected recently that I had once been “somebody” on the internet – with several open source projects to my name, and a following of several thousand users.

It all seems like a different lifetime now – a Narnia in my distant past.

I liked PHP, but I can’t help feeling it is going in the same direction as Java – it’s being ripped apart by it’s own unstructured growth. Rather than evolve under the stewardship of a single vision, the language is exploding virally in all directions.

C# impressed me to begin with, but now it too is suffering the effects of the Microsoft update cycle – not only does the dot net framework have different versions, the language syntax itself has different versions – each of which arrives just as you get a handle on the last one.

Even the mighty Python is not exempt – while based on a much clearer vision than it’s siblings, it too suffers from growing pains in terms of version incompatibilities. I have found myself encountering Python repeatedly over the last several months – perhaps a sign of things to come.

Strange, isn’t it – although I may not be the die hard developer I once was, the experience and scars I have gathered along the way stand me in remarkably good stead to expound cynicism about different platforms.

My opposition to PHP is of course transitory. Although I dislike it from a purist point of view, I love it because of it’s “bag of tricks” approach. Quite often a mundane programming task exists as a pre-built method. Of course, knowing that the method exists is another matter entirely.

In many ways I am thankful that I studied “Computer Science” at college, and not software development. We wrote more pseudocode than specific source code – a fortuitous preparation for a modern world muddied with so many alternative platforms and languages.

The higher level arguments – object orientism versus procedural programming, and open source versus closed source – are the subjects that now interest me. Almost anybody can write software – it’s more interesting to see how different people approach large or complex problems.

It’s the difference between being interested in the skills of the bricklayer versus those of the architect and the engineer.