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PHP: A fractal of bad design

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Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#301

Post by nbpoole »

ericingram wrote: post #297
losvedir wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why: http://www.google.com/search?q=php+mysql Searching for PHP and MySQL yields tons of tutorials, code examples, and documentation related to the now-deprecated mysql interface. When I wrote my first comprehensive PHP application last year I spent half a day trying to determine best practices before finally settling on PDO. Newbies won't go through that effort, and will naively land on mysql rather than PDO…

There's a lot of tutorials, and that makes PHP bad? Sure the tutorials don't teach what you prefer. This just seems like a silly argument.

It's not a matter of preference: it's a matter of secure or insecure. The mysql extension for PHP doesn't support prepared statements and as such is inherently less secure than any other mechanism for working with MySQL (The mysqli extension and PDO being the two alternatives for PHP). But losvedir's point is that the number of tutorials that use the mysql extension's API far outweighs the number of tutorials that use PDO or mysqli, and that those tutorials are often very poor quality (ie: contain SQLI).

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#302

Post by jerf »

colanderman wrote: post #259
fragsworth wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the problem with eval? Even Python lets you do that. There are legitimate uses for it.

Name one. I can't think of any that aren't better served by other constructs. eval does have one huge, honking problem though: it permits text to be interpreted as code. This is just asking for code injection attacks. If you really need incremental/multi-stage evaluation, see MetaOCaml ( http://www.metaocaml.org/ ) for the proper way to do it (without exposing yourself to injection vulnerabilities). It's a consequenc…

"Name one. I can't think of any that aren't better served by other constructs."

User input of code. It's hard to implement a REPL without it. Even if you do implement without it there's still an "exec" implementation hiding in there somewhere.

Also, on rare occasions, it is actually an optimization when used carefully, like the Python nametuple example mentioned nearby.

I'm just answering your challenge. I totally agree that in general it's a bad idea and that's an unusual case. While for it to work properly it has to ship with the interpreter, if I were designing a language I would move it out of the global namespace at least, and require some sort of explicit module import with lots of dire warnings in the documentation.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#303

Post by s0me0ne »

PHP doesn't require any libraries to build a simple website. I've yet to see any document that shows in great detail (more than a simple 1 chapter static page based site) how to build a website using Ruby or Python by itself. No libraries, frameworks (no Rails, no Django) or other external stuff, just plain old Ruby or Python. I think this combined with the fact it's very easy to learn, the ton of tools out there, ton of web apps make it a hard language to kill.

What really can be done? Should they make a new version that provides more consistant function names and break backwards incompatibility? I've yet to hear what people think should be done with PHP besides abandoning it.

That being said I don't think it should die, I think it has it's place. I'm not as smart as the rest of the folks on here, but for doing client sites, PHP gets the job done very fast.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#304

Post by hardy263 »

ceol wrote: post #293
cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

> So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? From your edit, you've only been working with PHP for about 6 months, so you may not have seen some of the code most others have. Can you imagine, then, diving into a website's back-end to see @ all over? It turns out, the previous developer realized all those nasty notices and errors stopped happening if he slapped a @ on eve…

> Can you imagine, then, diving into a website's back-end to see @ all over? It turns out, the previous developer realized all those nasty notices and errors stopped happening if he slapped a @ on everything.

You've turned something that's a person's fault into something that's the language's fault.

Other languages have some sort of warning suppression as well, like Java's @SuppressWarnings or C#'s #pragma warning disable. Although they won't suppress all errors like PHP does, it can still bite you if you don't fix them.

It IS snobbery. You're taking a look at other people's code, and judging the language from it. I've written PHP for about 3 years and I've never once used the @ to suppress errors.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#306

Post by epo »

I am deeply amused by all the PHP apologists in this thread, I assume it is an equal mix of Stockholm syndrome and people vehemently defending the only thing they (think they) have any experience with.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#309

Post by pfraze »

ceol wrote: post #293
cletus wrote: post #264

If this one thing that annoys me on HN it's the pervasive anti-PHP snobbery. A selection from the OP: > Because of the @, the warning about the non-existent file won’t be printed. So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? > The language is full of global and implicit state. "Global" is one of those dogmatic points. Nothing is truly "global" in PHP. The "global" in PHP j…

> So your complaint is that when you use @ to suppress an error it... suppresses the error? From your edit, you've only been working with PHP for about 6 months, so you may not have seen some of the code most others have. Can you imagine, then, diving into a website's back-end to see @ all over? It turns out, the previous developer realized all those nasty notices and errors stopped happening if he slapped a @ on eve…

> This is the norm in PHP because, like the author said, it makes it incredibly easy to write bad code.

I do maintenance for a lot of PHP sites at my job, and the code is staggeringly difficult to debug or modify. It's punishment for my sins.

PHP was a tool for generating textual data structures (HTML) and it should've been leveraged by another tool for control flow and business logic, but it wasn't. The code I maintain is pre-frameworks; it's got no DRY, no separation of concerns, no design forethought at all. It's just HTML generation that satisfies its needs as they arise.

Now PHP is a quirky, mediocre, and capable language that's still really good at generating HTML.

Re: PHP: A fractal of bad design

#310

Post by eblume »

sjwright wrote: post #173
eblume wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What English is good at is expressing a huge variety of ideas. I once heard someone argue on NPR (sorry, no citation) that English is perhaps the /best/ language at expressing absolutely any idea to another person precisely because it has such a huge vocabulary and so many idiomatic phrases. I've sometimes heard of programming as an art, like poetry, but if so I'd prefer to maintain that it is a minimalist art that e…

> I once heard someone argue on NPR (sorry, no citation) that English is perhaps the /best/ language at expressing absolutely any idea to another person precisely because it has such a huge vocabulary and so many idiomatic phrases. I heard that on the radio, and I've been looking for it for years! If anyone knows the show, ideally the specific show or interviewee, I'd be supremely grateful!

I think it was a Science Friday, if it helps.
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