[plug] Hacker challenge ends in feuding

[Derek Fountain]

> On a semi-serious note, has anyone else noticed that there is nothing
> new under the sun? I mean, when I wrote software for my VIC20, bytes
> mattered, these days I have 512Mb of RAM, vs. 3.5Kb of RAM, but writing
> web-apps, my code still runs rings around the opposition because bytes
> still matter.

Can you elaborate on that a bit?

I started learning PHP a few weeks back in order to write a web based database 
app. Browser front end, MySQL and XML at the back, and PHP/Apache in the 
middle. (Is that the sort of thing you're refering to?) I found the 
technology very straightforward since PHP is a great language - simple, tuned 
to what it does, and highly effective.

However, actually implementing the code to build HTML pages is a discipline 
which I'm having to learn. Although it shares a lot of the basic tradecraft 
of general software development, there's quite a bit of new thinking to do as 
well.

So I'm interested in all aspects of this. In particular, what byte-saving 
techniques do you employ which make a difference to web based apps?

-- 
"...our desktop is falling behind stability-wise and feature wise to KDE 
...when I went to Mexico in December to the facility where we launched gnome, 
they had all switched to KDE3." - Miguel de Icaza, March 2003