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PHP's Oddities

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Re: PHP's Oddities

#31

Post by mfonda »

mdavid626 wrote: post #25
mfonda wrote: post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

If I have an “array” and can do array[0] to get first item, but when I filter this array and array[0] throws an error, that’s super weird. What is the meaning of [] or what is an array even? The language forces me to understand how it is implemented under the hood. That’s exactly what the author says: leaky abstraction.

An “array” in PHP is an ordered map.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#34

Post by skydhash »

shevy-java wrote: post #18
mfonda wrote: post #9

After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

You can say the same thing about lisp (and C in some regards). Sometimes a language is done and anything you add to it is breaking things for no sizable improvement. And if your primary target is Unix, it’s often so easy to write a shim for C/C++ libraries that you don’t bother implementing your own version of stuff.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#35

Post by acomjean »

shevy-java wrote: post #15

All of PHP is an oddity. It is a practical oddity, but also ugly to no ends. I am glad to have abandoned it many years ago. Surprisingly enough, I was more productive in PHP than I was in perl. Perhaps perl is even stranger than PHP.

Modern PHP is pretty good. I’ve been using it for a while so it’s comfortable.

I’ve been doing so Perl maintenance lately and I miss PHP. Perl is a lot weirder than PHP. If I didn’t know C or had dabbled in Perl before I would be completely confused. There is More Than One Way to do it (the Perl rallying cry) causes a lot of confusion. The one nice thing about Perl is that it doesn’t really change anymore, and you can see where it positively influenced others.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#37

Post by xp84 »

customguy wrote: post #22
shevy-java wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great. Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts suc…

> People seem to shy away from criticism. What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from? PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better . Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.

I used to really love the dead-simple ease PHP brought to server-side dynamic web stuff too. But when shared cpanel type hosting was orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else, that was a way bigger deal. Today you can deploy a node.js app (all the same “just a script” advantages of PHP) to a half dozen places for free, and for the next step up, a smallish instance at Hetzner, DigitalOcean or whatever, where you can just run any arbitrary container, costs less than those shared hosting once did.

Why do I bring up containers? Because part of why PHP was so dope in this way was the way you can just define 1 file per endpoint and drop it in public_html, and have no server setup to do. Running say, Rails or ASP.NET or a Java site back then meant doing… a lot more, to your server.

But with Docker, you can just steal a good Dockerfile template from someone else, and it’s just like 3-4 simple files for you to manage for a simple Sinatra (Ruby) or node.js version of the “one-off PHP file” things.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#38

Post by skydhash »

chuckadams wrote: post #23
makeitdouble wrote: post #11

To note, it is surprisingly refreshing to completely forgo instanciable classes on a modern codebase. Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.

Array shapes are still second-class citizens defined in phpdoc, with an inferior editor UX, and lack of any run-time enforcement. A proper record type for PHP with value semantics would be an ideal solution for me. Would go nicely with the pattern matching proposal that's still incubating.

If there is one thing I love about Clojure and Common Lisp, it’s that you’re not supposed to care about the shape of a complex data if it’s external to the module. What really matters are the functions that are exported and their signature. Anything that’s not standard in the library should be used as an opaque blob. And something like CLOS is about making this easier to define.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#39

Post by tredre3 »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #12
nasretdinov wrote: post #5

if("0") {} being equivalent to if(false) {} still gives me nightmares even though I've stopped using PHP for at least 6 years now :)

I knew this in and out, but as a Full-Stack PHP/Symfony/Frontend/JS guy who pivoted to mainly TS for b2b stuff, I still have to occasionally enter !"" into the browser console just to be sure, during code reviews :D

In JS/TS:

    "0" == false : true
    ""  == false : true
    " " == false : true
    "1" == false : false

    !"0" : false
    !"" : true
    !" " : false
    !"1" : false
In PHP:

    "0" == false : true
    ""  == false : true
    " " == false : true
    "1" == false : false

    !"0" : true
    !"" : true
    !" " : false
    !"1" : false
Honestly the only way to remain sane in either, but especially if you use both, is to always use === and never use boolean logic (!) when a string could be involved.

Re: PHP's Oddities

#40

Post by xp84 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #20
conceptme wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically every other language has the same functionality (or better) as a hashmap.

I’m well aware of them. I’m not sure I agree with “better”.

I’m very curious to hear your take on this. I started out on PHP for about 4-5 years then moved on to Ruby and JS. I never once had any fond thoughts for PHP’s split-personality array thing. So I’m very curious what it is that other people appreciate about it.
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