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Announcing a specification for PHP

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Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#111

Post by arenaninja »

frik wrote: post #36
arenaninja wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the same message on GitHub. Did you checkout the repo in order to read it? Personally, this is exciting news, but I'm not sure that PHP is ready for this after 20 years. There's plenty of cleanup that needs to be done to userland naming conventions and parameter orders that in all likelihood won't get done anytime soon to avoid breaking BC

yes, you can also use the "Download Zip" button there: https://github.com/php/php-spec PHP ships with a lot of third party C libraries that are exposed in PHP with usually their original function names. Object orientation came with PHP 4 and later with PHP 5 the new better one (5.3+ with namespace support, traits, etc.). You can think of PHP as a mixture of C, C++ and Java for web development and CLI tools. I persona…

I'm at work so I was looking to peruse the proposal without downloading things. You can read it from PHP's git mirror: http://git.php.net/?p=php-langspec.git;a=blob_plain;f=spec/p...

I'm not sure that I would call PHP4 objects object oriented, as I remember it, it was all such a huge hack (down to being able to return null from a constructor). I only had to maintain some code like that at the tail end of PHP4's life, so I never found out whether that was how OOP was done in PHP4, or if it was a hack to simulate OOP in a language that didn't support it.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#112

Post by mreiland »

cdmckay wrote: post #37
maaaats wrote: post #23

After recently having to work with modern PHP, I have to say a lot of the criticism of the language is unfounded. It's changed a lot since I first used it. But the stdlib is still hard to manage. Different naming conventions, different order on the parameters for functions that do almost the same thing, and every function is global. Couldn't they keep all that for backwards compatibility, but create more sane wrapper…

I thought something along the lines of keeping the existing global namespace mess but also add in namespaced, consistent aliases like you've suggested, i.e. myStr.replace() As the new ones get more use, slowly deprecate and remove the original global namespaced functions, in the same way they phased out register_globals

right, and then it becomes even less readable because someone calls in the namespace somewhere and half of your project uses 1 version, half the other.

No, just stick with the consistency of using the stdlib as is. If someone really has a problem with these specific issues they don't need to be developing, period.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#113

Post by DigitalSea »

Arnor wrote: post #79
maaaats wrote: post #23

After recently having to work with modern PHP, I have to say a lot of the criticism of the language is unfounded. It's changed a lot since I first used it. But the stdlib is still hard to manage. Different naming conventions, different order on the parameters for functions that do almost the same thing, and every function is global. Couldn't they keep all that for backwards compatibility, but create more sane wrapper…

Fun with PHP: $a = 'b'; $b = 'a'; echo $a."\n"; >>> b echo $$a."\n"; >>> a echo $$$a."\n"; >>> b Yaaa $obj = new StdClass(); $obj->x = 1; function x_plus_one($obj) { $obj->x++; } x_plus_one($obj); var_dump($obj); >>> object(stdClass)#1 (1) { >>> ["x"]=> >>> int(2) >>> } Huh? A local change to the object changed the object outside the local scope? It must have been passed by reference... function null_the_object($obj)…

If you're going to rag on a programming language on a site like Hacker News my advice would be to make sure you know what you are on about before you do. There isn't a programming language out there that doesn't have its quirks, look at Javascript, it has more quirks than you can poke a stick at, but that doesn't make it a bad language.

In your examples I am not seeing the issue? Am I missing something here? Your examples work exactly as I would have expected them to, as they would in other similar languages like Java and C++. Lets stop the hate for the sake of hating PHP, it definitely has its quirks in relation to methods and order of parameters in particular, but things are getting better and they're not deal-breakers for getting things done.

If you want to see how great things are in PHP, I would checkout the Laravel PHP framework. It is a very well built and robust framework that uses the best parts of PHP and abstracts some of the worse parts to make the experience of developing in PHP fun again.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#114

Post by stan_rogers »

maaaats wrote: post #23

After recently having to work with modern PHP, I have to say a lot of the criticism of the language is unfounded. It's changed a lot since I first used it. But the stdlib is still hard to manage. Different naming conventions, different order on the parameters for functions that do almost the same thing, and every function is global. Couldn't they keep all that for backwards compatibility, but create more sane wrapper…

The last goddamned thing I want in what is fundamentally a string-spitting language is to have the string features wrapped. Do what you will with the rest of the modules, but leave the damned strings alone.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#115

Post by cdmckay »

mreiland wrote: post #112
cdmckay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought something along the lines of keeping the existing global namespace mess but also add in namespaced, consistent aliases like you've suggested, i.e. myStr.replace() As the new ones get more use, slowly deprecate and remove the original global namespaced functions, in the same way they phased out register_globals

right, and then it becomes even less readable because someone calls in the namespace somewhere and half of your project uses 1 version, half the other. No, just stick with the consistency of using the stdlib as is. If someone really has a problem with these specific issues they don't need to be developing, period.

I would like to think that in any sane project they would choose one of the namespaces and stick with them. Moreover, I think that as you deprecated the older namespaces, this problem would go away.

You could make the exact same argument with removing register_globals: half the project using it, while half the project using the superglobals. Clearly there'd be some pain, but I don't think it would be as bad as you're trying to make it sound.

I'm not really sure I follow the logic that if someone has an issue with the state of a programming language then they shouldn't be developing. How does that make any sense?

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#116

Post by DCKing »

vorg wrote: post #73
revscat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrary to what many HN hipsters seems to believe, PHP is quite a capable language, and HHVM / Hack is really pushing things forward. This attitude really frustrates me. I'm a developer with over 20 years of experience. I don't use PHP because (a) I have had poor experiences with it in the past, (b) I am enjoying my current stack (Java8/Clojure/Groovy), and (c) would go with stacks like RoR over PHP if I had to ch…

> I am enjoying my current stack (Java8/Clojure/Groovy) Not just trendiness, but also whether a spec exists, from which alternative implementations can be reliably built. Some language despots (e.g. Python's) have even had moritorium periods of no new features specifically to help other implementations catch up. The spec announcement is a step forward for PHP. Your current stack is at widely varying extremes along th…

I was untder the impression that a Java implementation that wants to call itself Java can actually call itself Java if it is made to pass specification test suites.

There is currently one major Java(-like) implementation that does not do that, and that is the variety that runs on Android. But there are plemty of other Javas that call themselves a Java.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#117

Post by mbreese »

improv32 wrote: post #97
Arnor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun with PHP: $a = 'b'; $b = 'a'; echo $a."\n"; >>> b echo $$a."\n"; >>> a echo $$$a."\n"; >>> b Yaaa $obj = new StdClass(); $obj->x = 1; function x_plus_one($obj) { $obj->x++; } x_plus_one($obj); var_dump($obj); >>> object(stdClass)#1 (1) { >>> ["x"]=> >>> int(2) >>> } Huh? A local change to the object changed the object outside the local scope? It must have been passed by reference... function null_the_object($obj)…

Honestly the reference passing quirks you mentioned behave exactly as I would have assumed, am I alone in this?

Nope. I'm more of a Python/Java person and even I expected the observed behavior. Given that Python is my primary language, I'm pretty sure that I'm supposed to hate on PHP as much as I can, but really, this is stretching it.

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#119

Post by astrange »

hamburglar wrote: post #104
revscat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contrary to what many HN hipsters seems to believe, PHP is quite a capable language, and HHVM / Hack is really pushing things forward. This attitude really frustrates me. I'm a developer with over 20 years of experience. I don't use PHP because (a) I have had poor experiences with it in the past, (b) I am enjoying my current stack (Java8/Clojure/Groovy), and (c) would go with stacks like RoR over PHP if I had to ch…

Agree. PHP started itself out with the handicap of a lot of shitty misfeatures, and now that they've beaten it into a state that it's possible (though in no way encouraged) to write decent code in it, anybody who doesn't put on a "PHP: It's not that bad!" party hat gets called a hater. I'm afraid they're going to have to show me reasons it's actually superior to other languages before I'm going to jump on the train.…

So, if your PHP programs don't embed HTML in ?><?, and you use a framework with its own URL routing instead of multiple files, and your framework has plugin autoloading and initialization on every page request… why are you using PHP?

Re: Announcing a specification for PHP

#120

Post by skymt »

ck2 wrote: post #118

Facebook first needs to bring HHVM up to full compatibility before they try altering the spec. I also discovered Facebook makes all their "contributors" (anyone who does a pull request) sign an agreement with them, which seems weird and not cool. https://code.facebook.com/cla

It's not unprecedented. GNU projects require contributors to sign over the copyright for their code. Facebook's requirement of copyright and patent license is relatively restrained.
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