Interesting debate tonight in LinkedIn’s “LinkedPHPers” group. I’m not responding directly to Jay Alter, but this “ramp-up to WordPress development” he mentions got my attention:
I’ve actually seen and experienced similar “confusions” where potential employer / clients are concerned who not only don’t understand the difference between a professional PHP programmer and one who has “experience with a framework”, but also ones who truly believe a seasoned PHP programmer doesn’t fit the bill when it comes to programming for WordPress, Druple, Joomla, Typo3, etc. Granted each of those CMS have their own API and / or function set, but the fact remains that aside from the ramp-up required to become acquainted with the function set or class lib, a senior PHP programmer with 10+ years experience, IMHO, has much more of the edge I’m looking for as an employer than any “WordPress” or “Joomla” expert regardless of the length of time they’ve been doing it.
Here’s my response to the WordPress aspect of the discussion:
—
As far as WordPress development, the “ramp up is easy” attitude doesn’t make much sense to me.
I’ve been hacking WP for years. It feels natural for me. Why? WordPress is very similar to the BBS scripts of the 80s and 90s. Instead of Pascal I’m using PHP, instead of ANSI control codes I’m using CSS codes. It’s really the same stuff with faster connections and more people.
WordPress is the natural progression of the dialup BBS, which similarly ran on back-end and front-end scripts. Batch scripts, Pascal scripts, lots of scripting languages you could learn in a day by reading a “read.me” file. I loved it! Because most of the apps back then were not using MS Windows libraries–just about every app had a unique look and feel.
I see 1994 as a major turning point for software development. From my perspective, the trend was to OOP and MS Windows. All this happened around 1994. Bloated and boring was the new normal. I read a lot of books about OOP and Java in 1994. It wasn’t for me–give me a quick and dirty script.
So you can imagine, when I discovered HTML and Perl and PHP and even Javascript, I was happy. With the web you could see content, community, creativity come back into focus. And this wasn’t “Over-Organized Programming” that required (expensive) 10lb. reference manuals. Of course we do need OOP and monster reference books to build the really big, really important apps of the world, in all their glorious complexity and bureaucracy–I don’t deny that. However, these are two different worlds with mostly different concerns.