PHP: The Right Way • Hacker News Board

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#231

Post by mikeash » Wed, Jul 11, 2012, 2:41 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #230

mikeash wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because your comment is extremely difficult to understand and looks a lot like spam.

What is hard to understand about it? Most link sharing happens on facebook. If you share a link in facebook, people will click on it, IF there is a picture that interests them. If there is no picture 99% of people will ignore the shared link. So for the author of this website it would make sense to add any picture at all. When someone shares the link to his website, FB will automatically find the picture. But there i…

What's hard to understand about it is that it's a mishmash of words thrown together with no coherency. Your point about having an image to make Facebook sharing makes sense, but there's no way to extract that point from your original post.

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#232

Post by erikb » Thu, Jul 12, 2012, 11:59 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #231

erikb wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is hard to understand about it? Most link sharing happens on facebook. If you share a link in facebook, people will click on it, IF there is a picture that interests them. If there is no picture 99% of people will ignore the shared link. So for the author of this website it would make sense to add any picture at all. When someone shares the link to his website, FB will automatically find the picture. But there i…

What's hard to understand about it is that it's a mishmash of words thrown together with no coherency. Your point about having an image to make Facebook sharing makes sense, but there's no way to extract that point from your original post.

There is a dot missing between "sharing" and "Facebook". I just see that now. If there are more grammar issues, I am always open to learn. It's not my mothertounge, though. And I think I have that attribute in common with a lot of readers here...

Re: PHP: The Right Way

#233

Post by pbiggar » Fri, Jul 13, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

LnxPrgr3 wrote: post #189

smsm42 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think PHP is weird because you don't understand references. Reference is not a pointer, PHP doesn't have pointers. Reference is variable binding. $a =& $b is not an assignment. It is a binding - it means $a and $b are now bound to the same variable/value.

No, I do understand references. I'm just trying to explain how references in PHP are very, very different from references or pointers in any other language I'm aware of, and how they could be confusing to people who know other languages well but are less experienced with PHP. Perl does have a similar concept, but it calls it aliasing. Perl references behave more like what you'd expect coming from other languages. I w…

PHP has references, because once upon a time it didn't have pointers. If the only way to pass pointers is by value, then you are severely limited. So it got references, following (I assume intentionally) Perl's syntax and semantics, though with its own reference counting foibles.

Then it got pointers, and references suddenly weren't needed that much anymore. But it kept the old semantics, and still needs references for passing arrays around, since arrays are not objects, and PHP assignment is still by copy.