(no subject)

[torkell]

I hate PHP.

It just took me a good ten minutes to realise that I had typed $ids[i] instead of $ids[$i] in a PHP script.

And this is far from the first time I've made that mistake, which is because all the *real* programming languages I know have grown out of using prefixes to denote variables, and would not fail silently in such a case (well, VB would if you're mad enough to code without Option Explicit, but C and Java would fail noisily).

Did I mention that I hate PHP?

Comments

[ralesk.livejournal.com]

Perl for the win.

[torkell]

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[pleaseremove.livejournal.com]

Oh come on, you love it really.

You think thats bad, try searching for this difference in 500 lines....

({

[brokencube.livejournal.com]

You think that's bad?

Trying to find a bug in 400 lines of code: I had accidentally written '<<' instead of '>>' ....

That was a headache and a half.

[olego.livejournal.com]

There's a better reason to hate PHP:

How do you spell a function name?

First, there are abnoxious names, such as nl2br. I mean, seriously, what the fsck? Sounds like Netherlands 2 Britain, for crying out loud.

Then there are functions without underscore. htmlspecialchars, for example.

Lastly, there are functions with underscores. mysql_escape_string. Actually, a better function is mysql_real_escape_string, because the first one is actually fake.

Once again, WTF!? Why do you have split, explode, and preg_split, spliti, and str_split? It's awful and ugly. So my fav. languages are C, Scheme, and JavaScript.

Perl X_X

[olego.livejournal.com]

Perl, mind you, isn't much better. My loyalty to it is failing: I can't write anything without looking it up. The latest problem I had was that the break keyword should actually have been the last keyword, even thought the break worked perfectly fine.

And don't even get me started on the 5 ways you can call a subroutine:

a();
&a();
a;
&a;
goto &a;

I mean, yes, all five are slightly different, but for Crissakes! And typeglobs? And automatically flattened lists UNLESS you use references, in which case it's $var{$something} or $var->$something... Grr.

[torkell]

How about this for a better reason:

$foo = "banana\n";

echo "Before doStuff:" . $foo;
doStuff();
echo "After doStuff:" . $foo;

function doStuff()
{
    echo "Entering doStuff:" . $foo;
    $foo = "apple\n";
    echo "Leaving doStuff:" . $foo;
}

Without running it, guess what it'll output.

Then try to name another mainstream programming language which behaves the same way.

[olego.livejournal.com]

Behaves just as expected by me. Yea, I admit that the idea of global and superglobal variables is a bit quirky, but what's even more quirky is being able to use variables before defining them.

Fine, it's a scripting language, etc., etc. :-)

[torkell]

I can cope with the latter (it's pretty traditional in scripting languages, and VB6 lets you work like that if you don't use Option Explicit), but the former has tripped me up several times. It's the only language I know where the rules for scope are different.