Programming Dyslexia

[shannon_a]

I spent the afternoon today programming in Perl--expanding and cleaning up a library which we've been building at work that interfaces with our forums and allows us to make that information available to other applications.

And then after dinner & 12 Monkeys tonight I decided to do a bit of work on my current "after hours" projects--revising the submission process for reviews at RPGnet, code that I've been writing in PHP, since that's what the RPGnet code base that I've inherited is written in.

Using these two different languages extensively in one day caused ... confusions. I sat looking at one chunk of PHP code for about 10 minutes which looked something like this:

my ($cappedReviewType) = ucfirst($reviewType);

PHP kept giving me its very unhelpful "parse error" reponse, which boggled me because I *knew* that line of code was error free.

Of course I'd been writing legal Perl code, not PHP. They're similar in a lot of places, but PHP doesn't have a "my" function. Best of all, when I couldn't figure out what the error in my PHP code was I looked it up ... in one of my Perl reference books.

Sigh.

So I went to watch an episode of 24 to rest my clearly tired brain.