Mike Schinkel – MikeSchinkel.me

February 16, 2020February 16, 2020

Adding Delegation to PHP

In summary I am proposing the PHP leverage the use statement like the PHP trait does, but with a class modifier to allow for automatic delegation of method calls to contained instances.

Also I am proposing we leverage the disambiguation syntax that is already available for traits, and extend it in a few ways that traits do not address such as:

Use as to allow for renaming from the property names for delegate classes,
Add include or exclude to allow including or excluding specific methods, and
Add use method to allow for including specific methods.

November 12, 2019November 13, 2019

WordPress should deprecate themes — a modest proposal

“Imagine if — starting with version 6.0 maybe — the WordPress team chose to actually deprecate themes, and then added modules and components as first-class extensions instead? “

May 27, 2019May 27, 2019

PHP’s Composer is the worst tool, but it is the best we’ve got

Selective focus of person composing on a piano

“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Winston Churchill, plagiarized Composer for PHP is much like democracy, except for there are no others. So I have always hated Composer, for many reasons. And my views on Composer are admittedly in stark contrast with many others …

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April 22, 2019May 19, 2019

Can your coding standards do this?

I am not a researcher so I don’t have the statistics to back up my assertions for the post, but I have mostly written programs for a living for over 25 years — in my opinion — there is one hugely important aspect of coding standards rarely discussed and that is: reproducability. “Reproducability” defined What …

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April 18, 2019April 21, 2019

A better alternative to “return early” – PHP / WordPress edition

Yes, complex conditionals are worse. But there is a third, better way. And no, it does not involve GOTOs. Me This post is about a coding pattern I have never seen used by anyone else for writing guard clauses, especially when those guard clauses are complex. This pattern results in code that is significantly more …

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April 13, 2019April 13, 2019

Pros and cons of leveraging Go types

Go is a great language — probably one of the best — but it is not without its warts. Let me illustrate one aspect of Go that is really useful, but also one of the issues that using that feature causes (aka an experience report.) Pro One of the many great features in Go is …

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April 3, 2019April 3, 2019

The drawbacks of D.R.Y.

D.R.Y., or “Don’t Repeat Yourself” has become a mantra for developers in recent years to the level of becoming dogma. Unfortunately, as with most dogma, it is often viewed more of an absolute rule and less of a general guideline that often should be ignored. The opposite of D.R.Y. Since we have this nice cheesy …

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March 31, 2019April 1, 2019

On Typing Strings in Go

One of the niftier aspects of programming in Go is you can create named types derived out of existing types. For example, let’s consider storing and passing a URL. Depending on their needs programmers get to choose either a string or a class to represent URLs in many others languages. Often times programmers will choose …

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March 22, 2019March 22, 2019

Go’s unfortunate err != nil idiom

All-in-all, I am a big proponent of the errors-as-values approach to error handling in Go. I definitely agree with the general wisdom of handling errors when and where they occur, and not delegating them using exceptions. So this post is not about how many people find needed to handle errors through code an annoyance. To …

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March 20, 2019March 18, 2019

How to explicitly declare that a struct implements an interface in Go

One of the things I love about Go and find to be a strong supporter of serendipitous interface standardization is Go’s implicitly declared interfaces. However, there are times you really, really want to explicitly declare an interface, such as when you have a larger interface and you want your IDE and/or the compiler to tell …

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