I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.
No. Bad rep comes from developers who used other languages and never looked back.
So they stopped developing in PHP am I right?
PHP's Oddities
71–80 of 186 posts
Re: PHP's Oddities
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.
What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it int…
PHP should learn from JS where you have to abandon frameworks every two years.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#73After 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…
yes I say this now very often, that PHP has morphed into runtime Java. Quite nice in some ways.
In PHP though the STDlib is not very well thought out, it may be fun(needle,haystack) or fun(haystack,needle) and you just have to remember
empty() will do weird stuff like a string with the value "0" is also empty, so not great for parsing things.
A lot of footguns and the best way to avoid that is with a decent linter that lets you be picky
another thing I mention is avoiding the array_ stuff because of aformentioned reasons, it's easier to remember/reason about boring loops unfortunately.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#74I think the “bad rep” is coming from developers that stopped developing themselves.
I've written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing, and I can say that PHP very much deserved the bad rap it had for some time. It's evolved beyond most of that, but a lot of that is due to the composer ecosystem making up for it while the behavior of many builtins remains beyond repair. Which is fine, every language has baggage and warts. PHP's warts are sometimes heinously ugly, and they're on full d…
The most under appreciated thing about PHP is the fact that after 20+ years I can still develop in PHP and never had to learn a JS framework, Rust, Go, Ruby, Java or .NET.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#75[deleted]
Re: PHP's Oddities
#76Re: PHP's Oddities
#77After 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…
Php has compile time safety too but compile time occurs at roughly the same time as runtime lol
Re: PHP's Oddities
#78Arrays in PHP are mostly confusing if you are used to them in other languages. Instead of $array[0] - the first element is accessed via array_first(). Having them as key-value means, that you can easily just remove some items in the middle, during iteration etc. No automatic shifting happening. The thing which bites me is when some internal functions actually reindex the array. array_filter does not, but for example…
There's one problem with arrays that I haven't seen mentioned here or by the OP: when inserting a key-value, the type of the key may change. For instance ["4" => "four"] === [4 => "Four"] This can lead to some unexpected behaviors. For example, I've already been bitten by `array_merge()` whose result is different if its parameters are arrays with numeric indexes. array_merge(["4 " => "four"], ["5 " => "five"]) // ["4…
The key type changing is generally not a problem per se, but it's definitely odd with the default re-indexing behaviour depending on whether something is integer keys only or not.
That's exactly what I've been complaining in my post above. If there were no automatic reindexing, then this wouldn't be a problem either.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I attended a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf at a FOSS conference in 2006. It has been a long time, so I remember only a few things from the talk, but one thing I remember him talking about is how people love to complain about PHP, often on forums that are themselves written in PHP.
Did someone reply to him with this meme? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...
No, in 2006 it was still considered poor form to reply with a low-effort meme phrase instead of meaningfully criticizing his position with your own.
Re: PHP's Oddities
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of it came from the rather harmful "php a fractal of bad design" article that used to get posted everywhere despite being highly inaccurate and out of date. Thankfully its fairly rare to see someone daft enough to still try using it in a discussion. PHP's come a very long way since then.
What is inaccurate about it? Maybe it is out of date now, but when I first read it about a decade ago, when I did a fair amount of PHP development, I had personally encountered most of the issues mentioned in there. I've heard that PHP has improved a lot since then, but I don't see how you could really fix all the inconsistencies, global state, and "oddities" without a lot of breaking changes and really making it int…
> What is inaccurate about it?
It's been debunked so many times over the years, I'm afraid I don't have the energy or desire to do it again when it's really not needed if you're far out of the php ecosystem that it really won't make a difference. Suffice to say the PHP it is talking about is nothing at all like modern PHP.