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These are things in PHP which make me sad

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Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#101

Post by jessedhillon »

jrockway wrote: post #67
PaulHoule wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you could say that all other web platforms are blub because they don't see the value that PHP brings to the table. a total idiot can install PHP and get a system that will meet the performance and reliability needs of 99.5 of web sites out there. tomcat, mod_perl, the ten different ways people host Ruby sites and all that make a lot more trouble for you. I've run PHP-based web servers for hundreds of sites that have…

a total idiot can install PHP and get a system that will meet the performance and reliability needs of 99.5 of web sites out there. This is like living in a house where the builders were "total idiots" and hammered in all the screws with a hammer instead of screwing them in with a screwdriver. Sure, it holds together. It might not even collapse in a light breeze. But one day, you'll want to reshingle the roof, or the…

I know I might get voted down for not adding to the discussion, but I loved this post. I actually LOL'd. Hammered in screws is exactly how PHP feels to me. And, as a long-time PHP dev who still has to use it on the job (but never for personal projects), putting up a defense of it screams "n00b" to me more than anything else.

It's one thing to justify its use on the grounds of supporting legacy systems, or other similar compromises. But if you actually think it's a good, well-designed language, then your metric of "goodness" vis-a-vis programming languages is uninformed.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#103

Post by pornel »

jwatzman wrote: post #102

My favorite PHP design misfeature: what does the following code do? The "&" is a foreach-by-reference, for those not familiar with the language. When you think you've figured it out, you can execute the code at http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~jwatzman/foreach.php

    unset($bar)
after the first loop is highly recommended.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#104

Post by EamonLeonard »

dexen wrote: post #78
EamonLeonard wrote: post #70

PHP is Open Source. Compiling a list like this is nice, but contributing something back, and getting involved in making improvements to PHP, would be nicer.

There's an outstanding request for better array syntax. It's been out there for over 3 years and received a lot of support from the community. At least one implementation has been submitted. But the core dev team rejected the idea, as they are convinced having second syntax available would harm ease of use (and thus popularity) of the language. In general, some aspects of PHP will not be fixed/improved for reasons of…

Indeed, one of the downsides of Open Source... politics etc, it doesn't help, but tends to come with the territory.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#105

Post by rmason »

PaulHoule wrote: post #91
rmason wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am getting a 404 with the link right now. Railo is a JBOSS project that is an open source version of CFML. Here's what they say about Railo in comparison to PHP: • Simplicity More powerful tags for simple file, email, database and other common operations. • Best Practices Support If you want to build OO apps using TDD, you can do so. If not, you can still hack out working scripts in minutes. • Frameworks A wide ran…

you've got to be kidding; PHP is a better Cold Fusion than Cold Fusion ever was

I need more than a simple fan boy boast. Download it first and then tell me why.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#106

Post by EamonLeonard »

code_duck wrote: post #76
EamonLeonard wrote: post #70

PHP is Open Source. Compiling a list like this is nice, but contributing something back, and getting involved in making improvements to PHP, would be nicer.

Raising awareness of what needs to be fixed is the first step.

Agreed, but if you're going to put the energy into picking out what doesn't work, you probably have spent time thinking about how it should be done, so following through is worthwhile for all concerned.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#107

Post by birken »

gburt wrote: post #9
jcampbell1 wrote: post #7

php -r 'array("a","b")[0];' results in a parse error.

Resolving arrays like that causes parse errors in a range of contexts. Anything that is a "function" cannot also pick one array key... leaving a lot of XML-parsing code that looks like $xml = getXpathWhatever(); $xml = $xml[0]; Stranger yet, is that it works perfectly fine with resolving objects... for example $xml = funct()->something->somethingelse()->a Works fine...

Array brackets after function calls are fixed in PHP 5.4:

~/php_source/php-src-5.3$ ./sapi/cli/php -r "function a() { return array(1,2); } print a()[0];"

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in Command line code on line 1

~/php_source/php-src-5.4$ ./sapi/cli/php -r "function a() { return array(1,2); } print a()[0];"

1

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#108

Post by blake8086 »

larrik wrote: post #28

What makes ME sad is no keyword arguments. Helper/wrapper functions either get an annoying and difficult-to-grok-at-glance associative-array for it's params (bad), or a huge list of rarely-used parameters (worse), or a huge set of wrapper functions to set their own paramters (even worse), or outright duplicated functions for similar-but-not-quite tasks (worst). This happens to me while producing something like a jqGr…

Isn't a wrapper function the solution to this? Or even... a wrapper function that takes an associative array of options as an argument.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#109

Post by shuzchen »

cgranade wrote: post #44

I'd love to see similar lists for other languages. I've been coding in MATLAB as of late, for instance, and rediscovered my hatred for the fact that you can't index the output of a function without assigning to a temporary variable. For instance, `foo(args)(:)` causes an error. You have to use `X = foo(args); X(:)` instead. That makes me just as sad as some of these PHP sadnesses.

That's called array dereferencing. It doesn't work in php either, you need to assign to a temporary variable. I've been following a patch in the works (at https://wiki.php.net/rfc/functionarraydereferencing ) but there doesn't seem to be much progress on it.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#110

Post by nimrody »

cgranade wrote: post #44

I'd love to see similar lists for other languages. I've been coding in MATLAB as of late, for instance, and rediscovered my hatred for the fact that you can't index the output of a function without assigning to a temporary variable. For instance, `foo(args)(:)` causes an error. You have to use `X = foo(args); X(:)` instead. That makes me just as sad as some of these PHP sadnesses.

MATLAB does get one thing right: Function arguments are always passed by value. This "referential transparency" really makes it easier to reason about functions and test them.

It's the one thing I hate about SciPy.

Passing by reference for performance reasons should be automatically handled by the compiler. I.e., A=sort(A) should be handled in-place without requiring a new function sort!(A).

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