31–40 of 140 posts
I always wonder why PHP never seems to favour making breaking changes to keep things cleaner, if you aren't going to improve language constructs in a major version, when will they be cleaned up?
It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though. Something that was easy to use for the person doing occaisional web work or beginner but without the traps and pitfalls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile Speak for yourself. If each line indicates what it is the parameter for I couldn’t care less. Nobody will use this for functions that have just two parameters. It’s the ones that have 10 possibilities that are crazy.
Why not use a dictionary or parameter object when you get past 2 arguments? Or is that not a thing in PHP?
I'm ambivalent. There's a tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of…
Agree, and I'd like to add the original purpose of PHP, and what made it popular in the first place was that it can be used as embedded PHP within SGML-ish processing instruction ie . Only that PHP made such a lousy hack job of it being not HTML-aware and not doing context-dependent escaping, that it would become the primary script injection/XSS attack vector on the web. PHP's forte IMHO is its community and the large installed base of apps (there doesn't exist anything like Magento with its first-party plugins by DHL, UPS, payment providers, etc on Node.js for example). Why PHP wants to become more like Java or JavaScript is a mystery for me, when there's a hell of a cleanup job to be done beforehand, such as fixing .
I get why it's being done that way, but the bit about parameter names being allowed to vary in subclasses feels... non-great. As a result you can't really safely use named parameters on calls without more extensive control of what you're being passed: even if you typehint to a class or interface, you can just get passed a parameter-name-changed subclass that breaks your call anyway. Feels like a "strict" type warning…
> Doctor, it hurts when I bend my elbow like this!
> So don't bend your elbow like that.
Adding a key to an array shouldn't be a breaking change, if you over supply a function by position today PHP doesn't error
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> break the function signature into one-line-per-parameter, which is vile Speak for yourself. If each line indicates what it is the parameter for I couldn’t care less. Nobody will use this for functions that have just two parameters. It’s the ones that have 10 possibilities that are crazy.
Why not use a dictionary or parameter object when you get past 2 arguments? Or is that not a thing in PHP?
I'm ambivalent. There's a tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of…
in python i started writing any function that takes >2 arguments as either def foo(*,a,b,c)... or def foo(obvious_and_required_thing, *, a,b,c) ... and noticed an immediate improvement in clarity.
I understand that this is standard practice by now, but this is one of those cases where I can't help but feel the language design team strayed too far from the original spirit of python. Now there's yet another possible interpretation of an asterisk: multiplication; splatting; exponentiation; declaring variadic arguments; and now declaring that all subsequently declared arguments are to be keyword-only. And I unders…
Named argument are more explicit.
I wrote a lot of old python and js code with dict/object as argument, they were dreadful
The fact it errors if you over supply the function arguments is a bit worrying Adding a key to an array shouldn't be a breaking change, if you over supply a function by position today PHP doesn't error
I'm ambivalent. There's a tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of…
IMO the same tension exists in Python. The hobbyist-hackers are using the language to write small-ish scripts, and the enterprise-scale developers are working on million-line codebases.
Unfortunately for the hobbyist-hackers, at some point (perhaps when the BDFL started working at Dropbox), the focus of the language shifted from the first group to the second. That's why, for example, Python now has a complex type system - that many developers never use.