Stories by Peter Wayner

  • PHP vs. Node.js: An epic battle for developer mind share

    It's a classic Hollywood plot: the battle between two old friends who went separate ways. Often the friction begins when one pal sparks an interest in what had always been the other pal's unspoken domain. In the programming language version of this movie, it's the introduction of Node.js that turns the buddy flick into a grudge match: PHP and JavaScript, two partners who once ruled the Internet together but now duke it out for the mind share of developers.

  • 9 cutting-edge programming languages worth learning now

    The big languages are popular for a reason: They offer a huge foundation of open source code, libraries, and frameworks that make finishing the job easier. This is the result of years of momentum in which they are chosen time and again for new projects, and expertise in their nuances grow worthwhile and plentiful.

  • 10 battles raging for the hearts and minds of developers

    Whether you think it's wired into the human mind or an inevitable product of society's formation, dualism defines much of our lives: Communism vs. capitalism. Savory vs. sweet. Passing the ball vs. running the ball in football. Everywhere we look, pairs are locked in an eternal battle, presenting us with myriad opportunities to define ourselves by which side of the line we favor at any given time.

  • 15 technologies changing how developers work

    A long time ago, developers wrote assembly code that ran fast and light. On good days, they had enough money in their budget to hire someone to toggle all those switches on the front of the machine to input their code. On bad days, they flipped the switches themselves. Life was simple: The software loaded data from memory, did some arithmetic, and sent it back. That was all.

  • 12 ethical dilemmas gnawing at developers today

    The tech world has always been long on power and short on thinking about the ramifications of this power. If it can be built, there will always be someone who will build it without contemplating a safer, saner way of doing so, let alone whether the technology should even be built in the first place. The software gets written. Who cares where and how it's used? That's a task for somebody in some corner office.

  • 12 predictions for the future of programming

    If hitting a target is hard and hitting a moving target is even harder, then creating a new hit technology is next to impossible because the shape and nature of the target morphs as it moves. Think of building a swish new laptop just as laptops are heading out of favor, or a must-have mobile app just as smartphones plateau, or a dynamite tablet experience just as the wearable future takes hold.

  • PhoneGap toolkits tame mobile app development

    The very first road to the various app stores from Apple and Google was paved with native code. If you wanted to write for iOS, you learned Objective-C. If you wanted to tackle Android, Java was the only way. Similar issues popped up with all the other smaller players in the smartphone market.