Is PHP 5.3 Terminal? Well, It’s Getting One For Namespaces

A language lives and dies by how easy it is for a person to express something within that language. But the ease in expression is much like the type I and type II error rate in a statistical test: as you adjust one to be nearer to where you want it to be, the other gets farther away. So the architects of a language have to choose between adding more keywords and constructs or having longer, but simpler sequences of existing ones.

PHP is a very easy language to learn and use because it has a syntax that is a simplified sampling from C++/Java and Perl. People who use these languages pick up PHP fast, and people who haven’t used any languages often learn PHP with as much ease as they would learn Perl.

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Posted in: Articles, Development

Meet Ryan Scott: Intern

My name is Ryan Scott, I’m a junior Computer Science major at Arizona State University and Synapse Studio’s newest intern. I’m currently learning everything I thought I knew in the world of coding was wrong, and that a semi-intelligent monkey with thirty minutes of spare time could destroy all the data saved in the MySQL databases of my pet project Nayrpg. I’m doing some basic grunt work at the moment while I work to iron out my first pseudo project that will gauge my ability to learn PHP and MySQL.

I love video games, food and my girlfriend, Jenny. In the virtual world, I lead the Moogle Mafia which is a giant (hundreds of people-strong) guild of video game fanatics whose purpose is to train new players in the games we play in. I enjoy browser-based strategy games as well as online MMOs. (Yes, I play WoW, and lead my guild of 157 players.)

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Posted in: People

Recreational Reading: Designing Interactive, A User Interface Blog

Twitter is great for keeping up with the happenings of friends and family alike, but it’s also a great tool for discovering new people and resources. Example: I follow 37signals’ @jasonfried, who tweeted back to @joshwalsh that Basecamp was up and running again. I clicked on @joshwalsh to see his original post and happened to stumble upon his great blog on usability & interface design, Designing Interactive.

Josh’s latest post goes into some detail reviewing the usability of the Old Navy site. It’s a great article, but I liked his article on red as an error state even more. (In it, he notes a specific example where an expired coupon displayed in red when it should have instead been greyed out, since the user themselves did nothing wrong, and grey brings less attention to the no longer useful data, rather than more undue attention to it.)

Josh has a lot of great advice pertaining to both the nuanced and big picture issues that designers face when developing intelligent, innovative and clean user interfaces. Do yourself a favor and add him to your feed reader promptly.

Designing Interactive

Posted in: Cool Stuff, Design