How Do You Pick a Standard or Format to Stand Behind?
So, now that the HD DVD versus Blu-ray is basically considered over, with Blu-ray the winner, it made me wonder how people chose one over another. How do you decide you are going to learn PHP over ASP, WordPress over Movable Type, Windows over Linux? What drives your decisions to chose one format over the other?
I almost have a fear of choosing one. I know a little ASP and PHP, WordPress and Movable Type, Windows and Linux. This means I am definitely no expert, and have always been a huge generalist when it comes to acquiring knowledge. I am always worried that I will chose the wrong format, or the wrong standard, and waste my time and money.
As for picking up knowledge in certain topics, it was mostly because of how easy it was to learn rather than how useful it was. I grew up on Windows, but found out that Linux was the cool geeky thing to learn, as well as being a required course in my college course. I have almost always waited though until whatever format war was complete, or at least properly entrenched into society that it isn’t going to go away for a long time.
Did you get burned by the HD DVD versus Blu-ray war or did you buy both formats or were you like me and chose neither format?
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As a student I don’t have the money to buy either HD-DVD, Blu-ray or normal DVD. But it was really interessting to seach which impact a gaming console has to the much bigger film industry.
But I think you can’t compare the HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray battle to choosing a programming language or a operating system. For example in some situations Java is the better choice to C (when the app must be plattform independet), but sometimes C is better than Java (when performance matters).
And asp and php can exists peacfully on the same web server while blu-ray and hd-dvd require different hardware (or at least players which support both formats, but these would be much more expensive I guess).
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“But it was really interessting to seach”
This should be “But it was really interessting to see”, sorry.
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I still probably won’t buy a Blu-Ray player. I’m holding out for HD movies On Demand that I can store on a drive.
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I was thrust into the world of programming by necessity. Along came a client who needed to manage a database of agents online. I found a good tool that produced Perl scripts that laid the groundwork for constructing simple applications. I used and learned Perl for about a year, and I eventually felt pressured to learn PHP for silly reasons, like it was the cool kid on the block. So, after playing around with building PHP apps from scratch (something I never did with Perl) a came across the CodeIgniter framework, and sort of fell in love with its approach. I’ve struggled through ASP on a few occasions, went back to Perl a few times, but I certainly feel at home with PHP. Perhaps due in no small part to my not having any formal training in computer sciences.
So, for me, it’s a bit emotional, if that’s not too weird a way of putting it. Perl is that good friend I met my first day of school but don’t see much of anymore. PHP is the guy I’ve been hanging out with since middle school. And ASP is that annoying kid that I have to deal with every now and then.
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I tend to wait until the war is over!
I waited to learn WP, I waited to see which won out of PHP/ ASP before I regularly used it.
Maybe I am just afraid of wasting my time
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When I was younger, I experimented with Windows 3.1 and DOS – I was about 10 or 11 years old and I started tinkering with QBASIC. I used it to write and compile a small program that produced a menu system that allowed people in my house to have customized Windows profiles (which was obviously something that was not an option at the time) and then I ventured into VB 3.0.
Though i was not a programming major in school, I studied C++ and Java to an extent. It wasn’t enough to convince me to use either of them though.
Years later, I began designing web sites and I tested PHP and classic ASP. Being that I had a foundation in (Q\V)BASIC, I found ASP to be the easier of the two to understand.
Now I am a full fledged C# web developer, but I have since learned quite a bit of PHP because I have worked with alot of WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla projects over the years. All those projects called for several custom plug ins, which obviously needed to be written in PHP. I suppose I learned PHP by necessity.
I’ll still use C# for any projects that are written from scratch. I feel that different projects call for different approaches and languages.