I’ve been spending a fair bit of time in the last couple of years learning to code in a new way. It reminds me of a transition I made in coding from having written stand-alone applications for varied computers, to writing code for the web. When I was in college, grad school and early in my academic career (this dates me – from the early 80s to early 90s), I spent a lot of time writing stand-alone applications, mostly in Pascal and C. The shift from that kind of code, to writing for the web was a lesson in protocols, constraints, and different ways of troubleshooting.
The transition from writing free-form web applications, to writing modules for Drupal, or APEX customizations for Salesforce, is another set of lessons in protocols and constraints. First, it’s not enough to understand the syntax and form of the language (this is especially true for APEX – and beware the required test coverage!) One has to understand how the surrounding application works – what APIs or methods one can use, and how. And unlike long standing languages, there aren’t lots of detailed cookbooks and that sort of thing lying around – a lot of it is learning from other folks, as well as just learning by trial and error.
And, in my small forays into learning frameworks like CakePHP, Ruby On Rails, and others, it seems like these days, coding for the web is many lessons in constraints – which is a good thing, I think. Even though it feels like beating my head against a wall, it’s nice to know that I won’t “dump core” and break Salesforce (although I for sure have broken Drupal on occasion!)
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