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These are things in PHP which make me sad

phpsadness.com

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Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#121

Post by z92 »

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...

I usually write it as

$xml = reset(getXpathWhatever());

which returns the first element from array.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#123

Post by ars »

So how do I contact the author with updates?

I clicked on a random item - the complaint that explode() doesn't take the empty string and return an array of each letter. But of course you can just use the str_split() function to do that (which is way more logical than passing an empty string).

So how do I contact the author and reduce his sadness level?

Or is this one of those websites that don't want to remove items, even if they are wrong?

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#124

Post by alanh »

thinkcomp wrote: post #6

I've definitely run into #1 on the list. "Paamayim Nekudotayim" is a transliterated version of פעמיים נקודתיים‎, which means "double colon" in Hebrew. Zeev and Andi are Israeli, which kind of explains it, but the error message is still pretty useless.

Of all these complaints, I’m most forgiving of the name of T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. You only need to look it up once; the cost is a few seconds of Googling and the payoff is you learn a fun random fact. It gives the language a bit of color.

Still, glad I’m not doing much PHP anymore.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#125

Post by danudey »

gergles wrote: post #18

The ridiculously terrible behavior of == is what makes me the saddest. http://www.php.net/manual/en/types.comparisons.php We then have === which does what == is really supposed to do, but even that still sometimes does the Wrong Thing.

The way I've explained this (braindead) behaviour to people is that == is the 'equivalence' operator, and === is the 'equality' operator.

This sort of 'well, close enough' behaviour has bitten me in the past as well. While writing a JSON bridge between an older PHP backend system and a newer Rails frontend, we kept getting exceptions on the Rails end.

It turns out that the JSON library uses isnumeric() to determine if a value is a number or not - which makes sense, in some respects. The problem is that we had a parameter (the external vendor's product SKU) which was a string that, in some cases, consisted entirely of digits. On those few occasions, the JSON library would say 'Oh, this is a number' and encode it as such in the JSON.

When Rails tried to unpack it, we got an exception because our Rails model was validating the data on the remote end and choked on getting an integer instead of a string.

We ended up having to actually modify the JSON library we were using (everything else we tried either didn't work or had the same bug) to modify the check. Completely ridiculous.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#126

Post by Jach »

jrockway wrote: post #60
pornel wrote: post #16

There's a lot of valid points there, but "#33 Cannot override private methods with a subclass" is the right behavior. That's exactly what private is for, and it's important to know that such names are non-colliding and you can rely on their implementation. Use protected for overridable methods. You shouldn't mock or directly test private methods in unit tests — they're not part of the interface!

public/protected/private is a dumb idea in dynamic languages. If you don't want someone calling your method, prefix it with an underscore and say "the results are undefined if you call methods that start with an underscore". Done. Easier to maintain, easier to test, less code to type in. Come to think of it... public/protected/private is a dumb idea in C++ and Java, too.

Totally agree. Of course, because PHP has the public/protected/private idea, it's correct in not redefining those for its own meaning, so the complaint is missing the point.

I think the worst villains of the public/protected/private family are getter/setter methods, it bugs me when I see them in Python code. We use enunciate ( http://enunciate.codehaus.org ) at work, and we bundle AMF endpoints with our stuff. Unfortunately the Java-to-actionscript step complained when our data objects don't have getters/setters (since I like just using public attributes), so now I have two Python scripts: one generating the Java code for a data object along with annotations, the other adding getter/setter methods.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#127

Post by ceejayoz »

snorkel wrote: post #81
BruceForth wrote: post #50

things about php that make me sad: 1. it exists 2. it's used 3. many of its users make more money than me 4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath

I often find that PHP coders lack a total understanding of the LAMP stack. "Apache configuration? Huh? I don't know, our admins do that." "MySQL? I don't know, I'm not a DBA. I'm a developer." "UNIX commands?!! I don't like going in the terminal. I'm a developer." No, sorry, you're not a developer. You're a glorified web page editor.

Bullshit. You don't have to be a sysadmin to be a developer. Web devs often know the whole stack, but you're still a web dev if someone else in your company handles those parts..

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#128

Post by rimantas »

snorkel wrote: post #81
BruceForth wrote: post #50

things about php that make me sad: 1. it exists 2. it's used 3. many of its users make more money than me 4. it has poisoned the market, clients have learned to expect and even demand php-braindeath

I often find that PHP coders lack a total understanding of the LAMP stack. "Apache configuration? Huh? I don't know, our admins do that." "MySQL? I don't know, I'm not a DBA. I'm a developer." "UNIX commands?!! I don't like going in the terminal. I'm a developer." No, sorry, you're not a developer. You're a glorified web page editor.

Is PHP that different from other platforms in this regard? Any Java programmer knows ins and out of Tomcat, any ASP programmer is MSSQL expert?

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#129

Post by unfletch »

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

I filed that bug 7 years ago and they wouldn't fix it: http://bugs.php.net/29992

I had it a little wrong in the initial report, but it was cleared up in the comments. The reluctance to fix stuff like this because "people might use this for some weird reason" is one of the reasons I'm glad I don't write much PHP anymore.

Re: These are things in PHP which make me sad

#130

Post by nupark2 »

rimantas wrote: post #128
snorkel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often find that PHP coders lack a total understanding of the LAMP stack. "Apache configuration? Huh? I don't know, our admins do that." "MySQL? I don't know, I'm not a DBA. I'm a developer." "UNIX commands?!! I don't like going in the terminal. I'm a developer." No, sorry, you're not a developer. You're a glorified web page editor.

Is PHP that different from other platforms in this regard? Any Java programmer knows ins and out of Tomcat, any ASP programmer is MSSQL expert?

* > Any Java programmer knows ins and out of Tomcat, any ASP programmer is MSSQL expert?*

I'd hope they are experts, or at least have no trouble learning quickly. If they can't manage MSSQL or Tomcat, how do they set up their local development environment, implement automated integration tests, etc?

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