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Posted by Chung Leong on 12/22/05 06:10
Oli Filth wrote:
> I agree, it's a widespread success, but its also a big sprawling heap of
> hacks, afterthoughts, inconsistent function names and parameter lists,
> function aliases, issues with references that no-one really knows how to
> deal with, version incompatibilities, nonsense like magic quotes, ...
> That's what I was hinting at.
Aesthetics. Aesthetics. Perhaps one of these days you will come to grip
with the nature of this world. The ugly win because they do what it
takes to win, while the beautiful disappear into oblivion. Just look at
how Windows has prosper while the BeOS is in the technology wastebin.
Incidently, I say the same thing to my historian friend, who, despite
all empirical evidence to the contrary, thinks that the principled
politician would always carry the day.
> I wasn't referring to "critics" in the sense of academics, but to
> real-world programmers who might have wanted to use PHP if it weren't
> such a mess (compared to other languages).
Let them use whatever language they were using then. What's this crazy
obsession with needing to "convert" people?! PHP is not a religion--it
is a tool. It is useful to me and thousands of other developers. If you
don't want to use it, well, it's your loss. From an engineer's point of
view you wouldn't alter a product to suit the desires of people who
aren't even using it--because it's goddamn stupid. Only idle academics
live for this kind of vainglory.
> Bad coding *can* get you closer to a working (in one sense of the word)
> program - I've seen countless posts in PHP newsgroups where newbies have
> asked things like "How can I loop through my variables $thing1,
> $thing2...?"
That's just igorance. We all know that using an array in this
particular situation is easier. And once someone learn an easy way to
do something, he/she wouldn't go back.
> to which the answer is "use arrays instead", to which
> their response is "well, my variables do the job, so why should I?".
Very good question to ask in fact. If all you can offer is a
non-technical value-judgement: "it's good practice," then you're a sort
of priest of programming, not a software engineer.
> How about C or C++? They're immensely successful, far more widely used
> than PHP, and comparatively they're set in stone - you don't get Bjarne
> Stroustrup (chief mind behind C++) going "oh, I think we'll change the
> semantics of pointers and references" every 5 minutes. Yes, these
> languages get new features added from time to time, but because they
> were planned so well in the first place, they very rarely lead to
> backwards incompatibility.
The changes in PHP 5 were driven from above, without regards to the
needs of the user community. That gets us back to the original topic of
backward compatibility. Do you really think longtime PHP programmers
want their existing code to break? You yourself said that these changes
are made to please people are not programming in PHP. Now what benefits
do I get if Bob Bobinski the Java guru is converted to PHP? Does it
make my job easier? My programs run faster? Are my sites more secured?
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