Thomas Koch

Yesterday I had my last day at $company and today is my first day in freedom. I'll write about my future plans in another blog post. Here I just want to express the joy I had yesterday afternoon when I did:

I've started using PHP in 2006 and used it almost exclusively until the end of 2009. I believe I've learned most of what one can learn about PHP in this time. In 2010 I started to work in Java and only started to understand how limited PHP is.
I know that java is far from perfect. So I don't stop there and already started to learn Scala and looking forward to learn other languages too. But Java is for sure a better answer then PHP, regardless what the question was.
There are many reasons, why you should not, never, for no project ever use PHP. I'll only tell you my personal top reasons:

• PHP is neither strictly nor statically typed. I fail to see any advantage in dynamic typing. But there are many advantages in compile time checks, automatic refactoring, call hierarchies and many other goodies that every IDE gives you for java.
• The first time I introspected a running JVM with jconsole and could peek into the inner workings of my application, I knew that PHP is a childish language. The JVM is great, its tool support is great. PHP does not give me nearly as elaborate development tools as the java world.
• PHP5 copied its object orientation syntax from Java (at least it looks like this). PHPUnit is a great tool (thank you SB!), but it's still only a very good copy of JUnit. Why not just use the original?
• PHP is typically choosen because initial development is very cheap. PHP programmers are much cheaper then java developers and you can move faster with PHP. The resulting projects however become a mess of unmaintainable code sooner or later. Nobody wants to work on the code anymore and shops with such PHP code burn one developer after the other to keep the crap running.

I once advocated PHP as a serious plattform and even gave three talks about PHP. I feel ashamed of this now and apologize. Please forgive me. Continue reading "I've been young - I needed the money"

This summer I'll be a full time student (again) to finish my computer science bachelor. So I thought it would be a nice occasion to apply for the Google Summer of Code. Would anybody like to recommend me a project? Something around Debian, Java, decentralized social software, quality assurance or developer tools?

Thank you!

Update: Need to add Danga (Gearman), Liip.ch with Okapi, Flux CMS, Jackalope, rackspace, Samsung

Vor einigen Wochen habe ich meine Freunde Zellmi und Natalie in ihrer neuen Heimat, der Kommune Waltershausen (KoWa) besucht. Es hat mir sehr gut gefallen und ich wäre am liebsten gleich eingezogen. Aber meine Frau und ich sind gerade erst an den Bodensee gezogen und auch beide beruflich gebunden. Also warum nicht so etwas ähnliches am Bodensee beginnen? Es muss ja nicht gleich eine Kommune sein; eine Wohngemeinschaft wäre ein Anfang. Continue reading "Wohngemeinschaft in Konstanz / Kreuzlingen am Bodensee"