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The Right Tool For The Job
By Bryan Young
Expert Author
Article Date: 2012-01-24
It is always important to plan your application before beginning to write it, but one thing that often gets overlooked is the choice of programming language. All tradesmen have a "toolbox" in which they keep the tools of their trade. Developers are a bit different in that our toolboxes are the languages we use to create our applicaitions.
There are many languages at our disposal, but many developers have one (sometimes two) languages that they will go to every time. For me, that language is PHP. It is where most of my experience lies, and where I feel most comfortable programming. There is nothing inherently wrong in this; every carpenter has a favorite hammer, and every plumber has a favorite wrench. The problem comes when you are trying to use your favorite hammer as a wrench.
Recently I began programming a project in PHP which would require multiple threads to run concurrently. Now, for anyone who knows PHP, you know that is no small task to accomplish. That is simply because PHP was never written to do that kind of work. I wound up scrapping all the code I had written already and started from scratch in a language much better suited for that task at hand, Java. Even though I have not used Java in a while, and I had forgotten a lot of what I knew when I did use it often, the project was exponentially easier once I started building with the proper tools.
The main point I am trying to make here is that there is a reason why there are a variety of programming languages available. We as developers must be able to look at a project and know which tool we have at our disposal which is best suited for solving the problem presented to us.
About the Author:
Bryan Young is a staff writer for WebProNews.
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