Kill It With Fire
Urgh. Imma srsly. Just... Urgh.
"Hey" I thought, "let's be a Productive Pete(tm) and get some work done on muffins!". Great idea I says. So I blow the dust off the source code and start cracking on the TODO list. Allow me to say one thing:
wtf?
I always knew the code to muffins was hackish and I wanted to get around to cleaning it up at some point (make it work first, make it look pretty later), but seriously? It's more broken than a bicycle being shredded by a chihuahua on a rocky beach.
So I have decided to rewrite it from scratch, because (unsurprisingly) most of the ugly code stems from PHP. See, PHP and I have always had a rocky relationship, but recently it's been very strained: when do I use camelcase, and when do I use underscores? Do I pass this as ($needle, $haystack) or ($haystack, $needle)? It's a language in dire need of some better standardisation. Plenty of developers have fled the PHP scene long before I have for similar reasons.
As for what language to rewrite it in, I'm pretty set on using Perl for a number of reasons.
1. CPAN > PECL. PECL seems to be... broken. From it's strange error messages to its arbitrary memory limits, it just doesn't do what you want it to do. There are a lot of things with muffins (and other projects) that use existing code that I don't want to rewrite, but don't want to include with the code of muffins. CPAN will make this easier.
2. Shorter iterations. I know how Perl works and I like the way it works. This means that I can spend less time debugging and more time coding, resulting in shorter iterations. Not to say that I don't understand how PHP works, I just don't understand any of the devs' logic when making the language.
3. Insert a reason of your own here. Go on, you know you want to.
There are plenty of other languages I could use. Many will suggest things like Ruby that I don't want to use for various reasons. However, if you have a (suitable) language to suggest, go ahead.
I'm glad I made this decision now, while muffins is still simplistic underneath: the majority of the code was recycled from other projects, and perhaps assisted in the ugly codebase, so not much will be discarded and the rest of it can be ported quite easily.
This isn't to say that I will stop using PHP - I find it quite useful for when I need to whip up a script in a hurry, but for larger projects it seems like Python has become the main challenger, at least according to the rest of ze Internets.
P.S. I am aware that the twitter feed is broken. As are cleanURLs, and the Atom feed. This should be fixed whenever I get around to re-writing ze blawg.
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