The Insidious Nature Of Scripts
Nothing has changed the world for folks these days like Facebook, unless its WordPress. Facebook gives everyone a place to gather and WordPress gives everyone a place to write. Both are only available due to scripting. Now, everyone can join in on the fun. Scripting makes it so.
Learn a little HTML and you are off and running. The problem with learning Online is that most anything that you wish to learn is pretty disjointed. Oh, you can pick-up enough HTML to make a go of it on either Facebook or WordPress, but eventually you will want to venture into deeper waters. And believe me, there are plenty of oceans Online to lose yourself in.
Websites or Blogs don’t really do anything until you script it so. It doesn’t take long to figure out that you want either this or that to separate yourself from the others, and so you go in search of a solution only to find out that you will have to program it so. Oh joy!
Finding a piece of HTML or CSS is easy enough to get you through, but when it comes to scripting, you soon find yourself carried into those deeper waters. HTML and CSS work with a defined set of rules and it is those rules that people want to break free of; enter PHP. HTML and CSS are widely used, however, its PHP that carries the real power. That is one smokin’ hot code. I’ve seen flexibility in code before but with PHP, flexibility is truly off the hook. The best part about the language is that it is “easy to learn”.
When you write enough PHP into a website, you actually move from what is called a website into what is defined as a “Script”. And just like WordPress is open source; you can find a number of scripts that are open source. Once you get a hold of a script or two your entire world changes.
I thought I would pull out all the stops and tie on the script of all scripts and over-throw Facebook and I damn near drowned! WordPress lets you work on your own; scripting lets you work as a pack. I could only sit back and wonder at the sheer power of PHP as I worked my way through hundreds of thousands of lines of code. Oh man …… this wasn’t written by someone, this was written by a team! Maybe I should seek shallower waters.
PHP by its very nature is so powerful that once you get going in your writing, there really is no end to the “Rabbit Hole”. So, even the really small scripts are thousands of lines of code. It was one of these small scripts that had my imagination. As I peeked into the small files of the scripts, it was truly a wonder. I was looking at some really sophisticated code. “Easy” my ass!!! The kind of code that I was looking at took years to learn how to write. I guess the best way to describe it is, everything is so spread out and so tightly strung together that it’s a wonder anything works at all.
It’s this level of sophistication that has me challenged. PHP may be easy to learn, but its a bitch to master!
