Out of Hand

Out of Hand - The Cover Story

October 2013


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	Thu, Jul. 1st, 2004 04:20 pm

Out of Hand

Work was surreal today. I couldn't get my hand back to my keyboard from the phone before it rang again. Unbelievable. Even had a customer offer me a case of vodka as a thanks for some specially authorized support. Too bad I don't drink.

Been writing a lot of PHP recently, building a new Misjump.com. Its fun, but much harder than I thought it would be. The multiprocess nature of web-based applications make something so complex rather difficult to manage. Security is also a major concern, but functionality is my present goal.

petercooperjr

Peter Cooper Jr.

	Thu, Jul. 1st, 2004 09:10 pm (UTC)

Security works much better if it's worked in from the first place.
And yeah, the whole web-based thing is a really interesting problem. People can bookmark pages in the middle of your web application. HTTP was not designed to run applications, but since everyone could use it, people did it anyway.

bronzite

Robert Bronzite

	Fri, Jul. 2nd, 2004 06:17 am (UTC)

Yeah. Its definitely a case of "right problem, wrong tool". But it all boils down to a state machine, so it should work fine, right?

...right?

petercooperjr

Peter Cooper Jr.

	Fri, Jul. 2nd, 2004 10:40 am (UTC)

Well, assuming that you have a way to save state between function calls (a.k.a. web page loads). That's what was tacked onto HTTP as an afterthought.

It should work fine, yes. But most people aren't used to needing to make all their function calls (web pages) re-entrant such that a user can drop a computation and pick it up later. I'm probably explaning it poorly, but we covered it in the graduate Language Design class (along with how let/cc was the same thing, and a very powerful tool). But I doubt you want me to get into that.

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