Page 1 of 1

PHP & Basketball

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 4:32 am
by Grim...
Bear with me here :)

On Sundays I coach kids on how to play basketball, and I've noticed something odd.
The kids that show up who can do round-the-back layups and fancy dribbling moves always get surpassed by the end of the season by the kids that learned their fundamentals.
Yes indeed, crazy-layup boy scored 30 points a game, but he couldn't pass or defend, and he let 40 points go in, so he's useless.

You with me here?

Since joining this site, I've helped a few people with their problems and I notice a similar trend.

People come on and say "I'm building a site that will hook up to someone's e-mail and filter the spam and use a socket to connect to a kettle and make them some coffee. Now, how do I set a cookie?" and I just stare in disbelief - they are using code in some places that I don't understand, but they don't know how to create an array or something.

The question is, are these PHP 'fundemental-skippers' going to go the same way as their basketball counter-parts by the end of the season?

Or am I talking crap?

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 4:55 am
by patrikG
Nah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I'm fully with you there.
The good thing is that you can go back and learn the fundamentals - but by that time, those who've learned them at the beginning have moved on. I think you can simply ask more concise questions and find out how the whole thing really works, get the gist of it and then can deduct by approximation from how things should work. And in most cases, it's true.

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 5:11 am
by Grim...
The other things you find is that people are making huge work-arounds because they don't know of simple functions - using a while loop to count the number of values in an array, or something.

Once you get set in a habit of doing something the 'wrong' way, it's quite difficult to get out of it again.

In PHP and basketball :)

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 5:12 am
by patrikG
...and life :)

Guess the lesson to be learnt is: if you do something, do it properly. Now that's something I'll have to remind myself of daily ;)

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 5:27 am
by Grim...
And the moral of the story is:
Don't try and run before you can walk.
Maybe that could be a standard response to code queries that start "I have never used PHP before, but I want to build an encrypted shopping cart..." :)

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 1:50 pm
by PrObLeM
I also agree with you grim. Youll never learn if you get in WAY over your head because youll just give up.!

Posted: Thu Jul 01, 2004 4:45 pm
by tim
couldnt agree on the subject more so myself.

100% fact