One of the questions I hate to answer is “what do you do for a living?” It’s not that I don’t know what I do, it’s just that there isn’t a commonly used term that I can use to describe it. Most people don’t want to hear an extended diatribe concerning the exact position that’s occupied somewhere between graphic designer and web programmer. So usually I just tell people that I design websites, although there’s an aching part of my brain that assumes my fellow conversee now sees me as some kind of FrontPage doodling monkey.

I think the best term I’ve found is Interaction Designer, although it’s a term that means different things to different people. I like the word Interaction, because it makes my work feel so much more dynamic. I don’t build brochureware, I build web applications, you insensitive clod! It implies action, which is basically true because client-side code is all about making things move around on the screen in a predictable and consistent manner. I’m also appreciative of the word Designer because I work with image and color (and spend at least a third of my time in Photoshop). It makes me feel like a graphic designer (now with more future!), even though I have little formal education in it.

So what’s my point? And what does this have to do with drugs and programming languages? Well, as an Interaction Designer I get to experience plenty of web development platforms from the socket side in. That way, I get to form all kinds of uneducated opinions about the language and the people who write in it… and go to battle for it. And since I’m technically a Computer Scientist (note the capital letters), I know just enough about the topic to get myself into trouble when I post my opinions on the internet.

Over the past several years, I’ve written client side code in Flash and AJAX that talk to servers running a variety of frameworks — Struts, Spring, JSF, PHP, some custom XSLT (shudder) and JSP jobby, and a variety of others. I tend to learn enough about these frameworks to understand their architecture and templating system, but rarely need to go any deeper. But my latest gig has me looking at things from the other side… literally. It seems that Interaction, as defined by this job, also includes slinging PHP code and writing SQL queries. It’s not that I’m incapable (in fact, sometimes it’s nice to exercise those server side brain muscles), but ultimately it’s not what I really enjoy doing. Especially since I’ve apparently inherited the frankenplatform, a heinous mishmash of PHP libraries built on no framework in particular (unless you consider Joomla a web application framework… yeah, me neither). The problem with frankenplatforms is they are really hard to bring back into line with some established pattern or system. Which, I promise, brings me almost to my point.

In my attempt to understand and hopefully improve the frankenplatform, I’ve been doing a lot of research into alternative PHP frameworks, as well as popular alternatives such as Ruby on Rails or Django. And this has brought me into close contact with the various religious groups that preach their benefits.

In Nathan Rabin’s excellent review of New York, New York (part of his always hilarious My Year of Flops series), he writes about 70s “coke movies” and “pot movies”, revealing the unique characteristics of films powered by their respective drugs (and drug addled crew). I think this same concept can be applied to programming languages.

The “coke movie” of development platforms is clearly Perl – all twitchy and ego-fuelled, operating at hyper speed and totally incoherent to the sober kids down the hall. Ruby is most likely the pot platform – mellow and creative, beloved of indie kids and legal for medicinal purposes in California. If The Shins were a web framework, they’d be Ruby on Rails.

PHP is, I think, crystal meth. Sketchy and unpredictable, with bad teeth and a hideous grin, it still manages to accomplish a heck of a lot in a short amount of time. It steals the best ideas from it’s friends, but takes them to the street and abuses them until they’re almost unrecognizable. It’s also cheap and readily available.

Which leaves us with Java. Java is the beer of our drug metaphor. Cheap, ubiquitous, it gets the job done in the least sexy possible way. You can fuel a whole party on beer, but it’s a heck of a lot of work and you find yourself staring at a urinal more often than you’d planned. Still, you can get it pretty much anywhere and it’s been popular since the beginning of recorded history.

You’ll notice I left out .Net. It’s easy to take cheap shots at .Net, like making it the wine cooler or the Bacardi Breezer. So I will. .Net is the Bacardi Breezer, last refuge of the undergrad and technical school dropout, attractive only because it comes in the shiniest box.

Which is why I’m actively trying to recruit someone to take over the server side. Clearly, I’m not qualified.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 7:27 pm and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.