Bilingual

I’ve written about this before, but in a lot of ways it’s still current, so I’m going to write about it again. Hey Ho.

Anyway, as a web developer, I seem to be something of a rarity – according to various contacts and IT agencies, anyway – in that I can easily write websites using either ASP or PHP. God knows, I prefer to work in PHP, because ASP sucks the balls of rancid donkeys, but sometimes you just have to do it all the same.

If by now you’ve no idea what I’m whittling about, don’t worry. If you’re interested, carry on below…

The current work place is a perfect example, really – their main site is done entirely in ASP (but without a database backend, for various arcane reasons) but there are some bits that ASP is incapable of dealing with satisfactorily, and thus just have to be done in PHP. As a result let’s just say that there are a number of “interesting” sections on the website that use ASP and PHP in order to get the final working functionality.

The downside of this (other than the obvious little bits of complexity) is that both languages end up running in parallel in my head, which isn’t the usual setup at all – normally I at least get to be able to do the mental switch by swapping from doing one website to another, or by going from ASP-based work to PHP-based ‘other stuff’. Mentally having both running at the same time though makes for some depressing confusion (am I using $_REQUEST or Request.Form, for example) and some downright problematic debugging when I suddenly discover that I’ve used a PHP if/then in an ASP page, or vice versa.

And the real downside of it is that there’s no-one else on the team who can do either language. And that means that when my head is a total bombsite, and I can’t see the problem for love or money, there’s no-one else I can ask to run a quick eye over it. Which is a pain.

Still, despite the occasional difficulties, I wouldn’t change my skillset for anything – it keeps me in work, and the current contract wouldn’t have lasted anywhere near as long as it has if I had made the decision to only use PHP. Yeah, sure, it’s a rarity to know both, and it’s even more of a rarity to be in a job where I’m actually using both at the same time – but it keeps my brain working, and it keeps the challenges coming. And it also means that when it comes time to go somewhere else, I can go to a place that does either. Which is a Very Good Thing indeed.