To explain the slightly horrible fact that there are two modes, strict and weak with strict mode being enabled on a per file basis; people just couldn't agree on whether the types should be strict or if they should use PHP's existing coercion rules. (Or even a 3rd new set of conversion rules, but lets ignore them).
Having an optional mode per file allows:
People who want to write code with strict types can do so.
People who want to write code with weak types can do so.
People who want to write code without these new fangled types can continue to do so.
All without any issues of compatibility between running code on the current version of PHP and what will be the next one, and without any compatibility issues for libraries that are solely written in one mode, being used in applications that are written in the other mode.
\o/
To be honest, I'm completely in the strict camp - but it's awesome that we've gotten a solution that should allow everyone to use the mode they want, without splitting the PHP ecosystem.
The big benefit is you don't end up with "weakly-typed", "strongly-typed" and "untyped" APIs. There are just "typed" and "untyped" ones, and you can choose the behaviour that suits you best.
I would start by saying that everything, regardless of domain, is just a stream of bits. Which is completely useless, just like your assertion.
And I know what you meant, but you're also wrong. A JSON object is only a string before being interpreted. An x-www-form-urlencoded is actually a map in which values can be arrays instead of primitives. Such forms often correspond to domain models with a clear definition.
There's also no such thing as "obviously bad data". All data is good in the proper context, therefore automatic conversions that try to make this distinction do not make sense. I don't necessarily know how PHP behaves, but in another popular language there's a world of difference between "077" and "77". There's also a world of difference between integer, floating point and fixed point and the details are never irrelevant.
> therefore automatic conversions that try to make this distinction do not make sense.
You have to convert it somewhere. I don't see how the caller converting it is any better than the recipient doing it. Having the caller do it seems quite pointless when the recipient is anyway doing it.
Your answer about how everything is bits was quite useless since you completely missed the point. Your input is a string, you have to convert it someplace. Weak mode has the recipient do it. Strict mode you have to do it yourself, and then the recipient double checks.
I see no value in the second option - the actual conversion in both cases is identical.
But Danack disagrees, so I asked him to explain. Your answer was not helpful at all.
I GOT your point. I don't care about your point because it is not the question I am asking.
Why are you answering something I did not ask?
I am asking why does Danack prefer strict mode. There is absolutely nothing in my question that cares about the specific details how you convert bits to types, other than that you do.
My question is entirely about WHO does the conversion. NOT about the conversion itself.
(Oh, and the thing about bad-data has a defined meaning that went over your head because you are not familiar with the debate here. In this context bad-data means data loss on conversion. So "1" to 1 is fine, but "1 a" to 1 is not.)
The conversion itself is very relevant because you cannot establish a default conversion that should happen, therefore the conversions should be explicit, answering the WHO. This is why I asked you about what should the conversion produce in those examples.
And also in the conversion from "1.1" to 1.1 there is loss of information, because the two representations are not isomorphic. Care to guess why?
This is the point that ars is making. He is saying that it has to be a runtime check and/or conversion because it is coming over the wire, as a string, at runtime.
So the question he is asking is, if you have to do the check at runtime anyway, what is the benefit of the type hinting? Isn't it just belt and braces?
It seems like a perfectly legitimate question to me.
And by the way, to those downvoters who don't seem to be able to tell the difference between a comment you disagree with and spam, can you please contribute to the conversation by hitting the reply button or alternatively get lost? Only you're ruining it for the rest of us. Thanks
> Having the caller do it seems quite pointless when the recipient is anyway doing it.
Actually, I disagree. The caller is the only one who has semantic information about what the variable (and hence its value) means. All the callee (recipient) can do is blind cast it. The caller on the other hand can interpret it because it knows the meaning (talking about the developer, not the engine).
Over the years, we have refactored our PHP code base to something which is much more bug proof, and a lot of it is because we demand certain types to be passed to types. Currently we use doc types (for which the IDE helps us heaps) and type hinting for objects being passed as arguments.
For a given process (e.g. form submission) there will nevertheless be an entry point where strings from the web are passed in. But if you can minimize that area as much as possible, beyond that one place (a function or class) which understands the mapping from incoming string types to PHP types, you end up with a code base which behaves mostly like a statically type language.
This has reduced a huge subset of bugs which are caused by unexpected input being passed to a function. Having the language itself tell you when you made an error statically while writing is much better than having to wait until runtime.
A similar argument would stand for why we moved from dynamically created strings sent to the database, towards a database abstraction layer where we pick up syntax errors at time of writing.
> How does putting (int) before the arguments to function help anything?
It wouldn't. Anyone who is casting from an unknown type to an int by using just `(int)` is doing something wrong in my opinion.
Even in web-based applications there are at least two layers of code:
i) One where the type of the values are unknown and they are represented as strings.
ii) One where the types of the values are known.
At the boundary between these two layers you should have code that inspects the strings that represent the input values, check that they are acceptable, and convert them to the desired type. If the input values cannot be converted to the desired type, the code needs to give an error that is both specific to the type of error so that a computer can understand it, as well as provide a human understandable explanation of why the conversion was not allowed.
The reason why I want strong types is that I never, ever want to blindly cast from one type to another. The decision about how to convert from one type to another, should always be made at a boundary between areas of the application where types are known, and the areas where the types are unknown. I always want to be forced to make that decision in the right place, using code that gives useful errors and messages, rather than having the value coerced into the desired type.
tl;dr I won't use (int) to cast, I will use something like the code below.
cheers
Dan
function validateOrderAmount($value) : int {
$count = preg_match("/[^0-9]*/", $value);
if ($count) {
throw new InvalidOrderAmount("Order amount must contain only digits.");
}
$value = intval($value);
if ($value < 1) {
throw new InvalidOrderAmount("Order amount must be one or more.");
}
if ($value >= MAX_ORDER_AMOUNT) {
throw new InvalidOrderAmount("You can only order ".MAX_ORDER_AMOUNT." at a time.");
}
return $value;
}
function processOrderRequest() {
$orderAmount = validateOrderAmount($_REQUEST['orderAmount']);
//Yay, our IDE/static code analyzer can tell that $amount is an int if the code reached here.
placeOrder($orderAmount);
}
Thank you for the reply! (The rest of the replies to me got seriously derailed....)
So from your code it looks like the only benefit of strict mode is in case you forget to do the validation/conversion it will warn you? I guess that's reasonable. Is there any other benefit?
To me it seems that Ze'ev's proposal would be even better for you - it does the equivalent of the validation and conversion automatically including with an error if it doesn't validate.
You wrote "let's ignore that", but it really seems like to best of all worlds to me. Any idea why it was rejected so badly? Is it because the coercion rules are different from the rest of PHP?
Strict types make it easier to reason about code, that the tl;dr version.
> To me it seems that Ze'ev's proposal would be even better for you -
> it does the equivalent of the validation and conversion automatically
> including with an error if it doesn't validate.
Rather than having int 'types' which we can reason about, it has int 'values' which are harder to reason about. Types can be reasoned about just by looking at the code. Values can only be reasoned about when running code. A contrived example:
function foo(int $bar){...}
foo(36/$value);
In strict mode, this would be reported as an error by code analysis.
For the coercive scalar type proposal, this code works - except when it doesn't. This code works when $value = 1, 2, 3, 4 and breaks when $value = 5.
This is the fundamental difference; whether conversions between types have to be explicitly done by code, and so any implicit or incorrect conversion can be detected by static code analysis tools, or whether the conversions are done at run time, and so cannot be analyzed fully.
This means most of these errors will be discovered by users on the production servers. Strict mode allows you to eliminate these types of errors.
Yes, this means I need to add a bit of code to do the explicit conversion, but I just don't convert between values that much. Once a value is loaded from a users request, config file or wherever, it is converted once into the type it needs to be. After that, any further change in type is far more likely to be me making a mistake, rather than an actual need to change the type.
> Any idea why it was rejected so badly? Is it because the coercion rules are different from the rest of PHP?
At least in part it was because the RFC was seen as a way to block strict types; about half of the RFC text is shitting on people desires for strict types, which did not make people who want strict types be very receptive. If it had been brought up 6 months ago, there is a good chance it would have passed, or at least would have been closer.
Some parts of the proposal were good - other parts were nuts that were pretty obvious the result of the RFC only being created once the dual mode RFC was announced and about to be put to the vote, with a very high chance of passing.
* Good - "7 dogs" not longer being converted to "7" if someone tries to use it as an int.
* Bad - Different mode for internal function vs userland functions e.g. "Unlike user-land scalar type hints, internal functions will accept nulls as valid scalars." and other small differences. This is even more nuts than you might realise as it means if you extend an internal class, and overload some of the methods on the class, those methods will behave differently to the non-overloaded methods.
* Bad - Subtle and hard to fix BC breaks in conversion which are probably not right anyway. e.g.
false -> int # No more conversion from bool
true -> string # No more conversion from bool
It is a shame that the discussion became so contentious. It would have been good if the conversion rules could have been tidied up, but all the time and energy had been used up the not particularly productive discussion.
Of course I manipulate the data - that's exactly what weak mode does, convert the strings into integers. I just don't see how doing the conversion myself manually helps anything.
> It throws an error in case you receive bad input, and as we all know you will receive bad input.
It does no such thing. (int) will simply turn bad input into a zero.
Really? All the pages you program with forms, and links and whatever are sending you json?
I have no doubt you CAN do it, but most of the time you don't.
And since most of the time you are dealing with strings my question stands: Why do the conversion manually instead of letting the nice new feature do it for you.
Even AJAX sites do not typically send all data back as JSON. Most of the time they use normal form-urlencoded data.
If you did send everything as JSON you would be bypassing everything PHP does with form/url data to make things easier for you (for example arrays). That doesn't seem like a good engineering tradeoff.
Sending structured data from JavaScript to PHP is much easier via json and in PHP its as easy as calling json_decode() to get back and object or array depending on your preference.
PHP accepts nested key value pairs and frameworks can take advantage of that when accessing the $_REQUEST object. If you're bypassing the functionality that's baked into forms then you're going to have to put it back in at some point or reinvent it yourself.
And then you can't make a request to the server directly unless you format your data as JSON, which is a bit inconvenient, especially if you're debugging a problem.
So if using JSON as a container isn't gaining you some other benefit then it's probably best avoided.
If you live in one framework and always will, then I see your point. But if you want to have the ability to code out native solutions, use other tools where other tools may be more appropriate, or discipline your projects to be a little less biased, then asking PHP to parse JSON is not a huge buy.
That's how we've done it here and the modularization it has provided us has been incredible. PHP's json_encode and json_decode are also quite fast.
I don't really get your reasoning there. Forms are the mechanism for making parameterised requests over HTTP. If REST is your platform then it makes sense to start with them, regardless of any framework you are using.
I'm not saying using JSON as an envelope won't work - it is clearly working for you - just that I wouldn't start there, and I can't see that you couldn't work with the request object directly.
Maybe I'm not understanding our disagreement, but if I am incorrect please help me understand what I am missing.
In your preferred way, data is exchanged over HTTP which uses percent encoding to pass data. I'm stating that a serialized object, in this case JSON, provides more benefit.
Both require overhead to encode and decode, but I believe that serializing your data allows for a more consistent exchange that (provided I am understanding how you post and retrieve data) actually may reduce size, increase the variance of what can be transmitted, and remove specific limitations that HTTP may encounter.
First of all, I don't want to oversell this. I'm not overly precious about it and I'm not saying that having started with HTTP as a platform I wouldn't add JSON later.
I'm sure I could find myself in a position where I would want to standardise on JSON as a container for requests/responses, though see my last paragraph about Atom.
That said, my instinctive reaction against using JSON as an envelope is that it adds a layer of abstraction (and potential obfuscation) that I don't see an immediate benefit for. It may hark back to my experiences with SOAP. My mantra is to exploit the existing protocol to its fullest before extending it, and to do the simplest thing before adding complexity.
Let's presuming we're still at a basic level of interaction through a website. Treating something as a form with fields such as name="user[email]", name="user[password]", name="user[telephone][mobile]" etc, seems more discoverable to me, as a developer at least.
For one thing, I know there is no JSON translation layer to go through. For another, I can get a server to generate a form that I can use to test the interface quickly and easily. To do the same with JSON would require me to have some JS intercepting the submit event so that it can convert the contents to JSON before posting. So now I can't use a terminal based browser to do my testing. Which means maybe I can't automate some testing strategy so easily.
If we're talking about a more sophisticated RESTful API, I would probably choose ATOM over JSON, because ATOM is built on XML and therefore is defined by a schema and can be interpreted by the browser. Specifically, it provides the rel attribute for discoverability. JSON payloads can implement this too, but you have to choose your extension.
In fairness, if I were doing a RESTful API, I'd probably be thinking about being able to implement interfaces for ATOM, JSON, and HTML, plus whatever cool new thing is just around the corner.
I'll agree that your way definitely provides less abstraction, and my viewpoint doesn't perceive jt in that way. That being said, I've made a similar case against ORMs, so I understand your position.
I think of it as the English language of programming. Picking and choosing all of the best bits from every other language, and bastardizing them into it's own everyday use.
However, it gets the point across; taking a bunch of bits from disparate well-functioning systems and smashing them together doesn't guarantee that you'll get another well-functioning system.
Do you like Go? Part of the process for creating Go was to take the best parts of other languages and glue them together, while also throwing out as many features as possible.
Funny you should ask :) I'm best known for my article criticizing Go's design. I think Go is a reactionary language; it says "To hell with the last 30 years of language research; we want the good old K&R days back!" while making a few token admissions to progress (like good green threading). In reality, this approach eliminated everything that made C elegant (C is universally compatible with basically all Von Neumann computers, and Go certainly isn't) without actually taking advantage of 99% of the progress we've made. I'd hardly say Go has many of the "best parts" of other languages.
Finally! I had a lot of concerns about this, but I think they're mostly answered by the discussion. I do like the way union types work (at least nullable types) in Hack, but I think they existing `foo(int $param = null)` approach is fine for 99% of cases, and those that it doesn't work for can go back to type-checking at the top of the function (ie do what we have to do for all scalar types right now).
While I understand the optional strict mode, I do find it quite confusing: it looks similar to javascript's 'use strict';, and at first glance it sounds like it should be similar to `error_reporting(E_STRICT)`, yet somehow scoped to the <?php ?>. Personally I like the `strict namespace` approach they proposed the most. The argument against is that it will read like everything in that namespace is strict, when it's actually limited to the file, but I think it's pretty clear if I read in a.php `strict namespace Qaribou;` and in b.php `namespace Qaribou;`, that a.php is strict and b.php is not. I really don't see the ambiguity there.
Since I can't see the forest from the trees here, care to provide an example or two?
I've had cases where I want to only allow certain values (most often int) into certain functions (usually __construct, when looking at a primary key in a database), but in these cases I prefer to cast values. (int)$foo hasn't failed me yet, and I've internalized it as much
as I've internalized running application output through htmlentities.
I can see this being extremely useful if you plan on using PHP as a general purpose language, but I never have. I'd rather jump to Java/C++/Rust if I had to do numeric calculations (things like images, real time calculations, etc.)
Let's say the constructor you mentioned is for an ORM. Let's also say you're using a database library or PHP extension that you're not 100% familiar with, or maybe it just has a bug in a new version that you just updated to.
You pull out a particular row from this library/extension, and it contains an empty string (or even null) as the value for the primary key field.
Using typecasting, you'd get a value of 0, which is wrong. It would fail silently, and you'd only discover the error when you realize you're working on a row with no data. You'd even be able to update the row silently, because "UPDATE whatever SET x = y WHERE id = 0" is valid SQL!
With primitive type hints, you'd know immediately that you're getting an empty value from your DB, and you could go straight to fixing that instead.
In the past, people have had to write a bunch of unit tests to avoid all these issues. With primitive type hints, you could just type the word "int" and be done with it.
All that said, I still say all the people that are excited about this are much better off switching to a strictly-typed language, because my example above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to juggling types.
I take your point that this is nice syntactic sugar, but I don't like your example. You wouldn't typecast in this situation. You would check the value with is_numeric() or similar.
They're pretty inconsistent about it. They tend to avoid large deliberate breaks, but you still see smaller incompatibilities.
Off the top of my head, here's a case where they changed the output of a hash function between 5.3 and 5.4, breaking it for all previous users. https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=60221
> I haven't had a use for this yet, but I'm always amazed by how PHP manages to move forward without breaking BC.
This. If I were a Python developer (of the language itself), I would be paying very close attention to how PHP has handled deprecation and breaking changes.
Really? I see it as the exact opposite. Sure, Python added some pain from 2-3. They did so to fix the main flaws in the language and remove deprecated stuff. The language is now far better and the cost has mostly been paid. The alternative is the PHP approach where everything hangs around for ever, and everyone is using deprecated stuff, everything is named weirdly and lots of extra gunk has to be shoved in to try and make it work in a sane way because "we didn't want to break anything".
I understand why some people prefer that, and why it's the way most languages go (Java does the same thing, just with way less movement in general compared to PHP), but it means that the language gets worse over time. Eventually, if you don't do that breaking change, the language will get replaced by something that doesn't need all the cludge.
>The PHP 5 to 7 jump should be much smaller than from 4 to 5.
And also the jump from 5.4+ to 7 is probably smaller than the jump from 5.2 to 5.3.
Although I think the PHP project does need to support versions for longer, the adoption rate of 7 is going to be quite rapid due to the low barrier of doing it, and the massive performance and language gains.
Python 2 -> 3 did not have the luxury that PHP did with 4 -> 5. Python still worked, whereas PHP 4 was running around with its hair on fire screaming for a fire extinguisher that was PHP 5.
Bad analogy, but the point is that Python still worked for most people so the upgrade process was slow.
I think Go is going to have issues similar to Python when they make the jump to 2.0. The devs are already on record saying that BC will break.
(note 'use' is part of a string) should work in PHP for the same reason it does in ECMAScript -- it is a no-op at the language level (creating a string literal and doing nothing with it), that is unlikely to appear in old code, and can be given new meaning in the next-level language spec.
No it doesn't. The "use strict" declaration must occur before any other statements, allowing the parser to look specifically for those bytes, and treat it as a separate token instead of as a string. It doesn't have to inspect the contents of all strings.
"Whether or not the function being called was declared in a file that uses strict or weak type checking is irrelevant. The type checking mode depends on the file where the function is called."
That means that my function can have a parameter defined as an int in its strict file, but if it's called from outside of it, anything can still be passed to that parameter, right?
I'm not sure how I like that. What if you're passing input from class A into class BStrict then using BStrict to call a function in CStrict? BStrict and CStrict are defined as strict, where A is not. Would BStrict then be the one throwing the error because the "caller" is the issue?
From the description it seems that the parameters are effectively ignored in BStrict when A calls it.
> That means that my function can have a parameter defined as an int in its strict file, but if it's called from outside of it, anything can still be passed to that parameter, right?
Not at all. It's "weak" typing, not no typing.
A small set of convertible values can be passed and will be converted to the type you asked for, while other values error as usual.
Sounds right to me. If you're using untyped code, you shouldn't care what you're calling into. strict mode should only apply when both parties agree to it, otherwise strict mode would be the default and you'd have to explicitly mark code as unstrict.
Why do we need to duplicate the effort that people (some very smart people, btw!) have put into Hack (http://hacklang.org/), a sane strictly typed PHP successor with many other good stuff added?!
And as a bonus, both HHVM.PHP and Hack and are well optimized to run at Facebook's scale... seriously, let's just leave Zend.PHP rot away in the trashcan of history and move the f on!
Well an obvious reason is all the PHP site that have already been written, are crucial components in many businesses, and cannot be upgraded to Hack. Those sites' authors may still want access to all that good stuff.
In fact, this kind of feature may make it easier to convert those applications to Hack in the future.
You can freely mix Hack code and PHP code on the HHVM, calling functions and classes defined in any PHP file inside you Hack app. Then you can slowly evolve the codebase to contain more and more Hack and less and less PHP.
That's the huge point that nobody seems to see.
But then again, considering how many other huge points PHP developers seem to miss in general, maybe it's better to just let Node.js eat the world :)
I think it is important for what Facebook has done to fork and bleed all over the edge of optimization. What needs to happen is that the best features to come out of that float up to the root language and are adopted as part of the standard.
PHP the language will always rely on PHP the brand being as ubiquitous as it is. The more that can be done to improve the language, the stronger the brand and the longer it will endure.
Not really, I think. It was exactly as I expected.
I once attended a mini-conference where he did a talk about PHP history. After the talk, someone asked a question about strict typing. Rasmus really hold on to the web not having types (just passing strings, as have been pointed out in other comments here). I remember him saying something like "when the web have strict types, PHP will have it too".
Can somebody explain this to a non-phper? So PHP got strict types, but only for Scalars (Ints and floats) and they can be enabled on a per-file basis. Right?
PHP has had type hints for classes for more than a decade now:
function foobar(MyClass $foo) {
// do stuff
}
foobar(new NotMyClass()); // throws an error
This just adds type hints for the scalar types (integer, float, string and boolean).
Since PHP has a long tradition of weak typing and this is what PHP's built-in and extension functions use, weak is the default behaviour, allowing some conversions:
function foo(int $x) {
var_dump($x);
}
foo("12"); // produces int(12)
foo(null); // throws an error
But, you can optionally turn on a strict type-checking mode for scalars on a per-file basis, which doesn't allow conversions:
<?php
declare(strict_types=1);
function foo(int $x) {
var_dump($x);
}
foo("12"); // throws an error
foo(null); // throws an error
PHP has had type-hints for parameters for several version, but they could only be used for classes. The new types-hints cover the 'scalar' values (aka not object) and are int, float, string and bool. They allow a function to declare what they types of the variables it receives should be like:
function foo(int $x) {
// x is guaranteed to be an int.
}
The type-hinting for scalars has two modes:
* strict - the parameter passed to the function must be of the exact* type.
* weak - the parameter passed to the function will be converted to the correct type.
The strictness depends on what mode PHP was in when the function was called. This is the right choice as it:
* Allows library authors to write their code in either strict or weak mode.
* End-users to write their code in either strict or weak mode. Or even without using scalar type-hints.
* End-user to be able to choose when they are writing their code do they want their variables to be converted to the type expected by the library automatically, or do they want PHP to give them an error if they accidentally pass the wrong type of variable to a function that is expecting an int.
*except for some widening rules, e.g. you can pass an int where a float is expected, as ints can be converted into float without data loss (for ints less than 2^53).
There's no fundamental incompatibility. Hack files don't use <?php tags, they use <?hh tags. I'm sure Facebook will make HHVM handle PHP type declarations alongside Hack type declarations, though exactly how they'll interact remains to be seen.
This is going to depend on how Facebook decides to maintain their PHP spec. They might decide to fork it for all we know.
But honestly, if you're using HHVM already, you should have as much tooling/documentation as you need to switch to Hack itself within the next year or so, so all this PHP discussion is moot.
Runtime (like PHP's existing type hints), but they could be checked statically by IDEs and such. One benefit of strict mode is that it enables much better static checking than weak mode, because validity is determined by type and never value.
It was partly voted to skip the number 6 due to the numerous books available for sale that covered the original PHP 6 draft. This would cause confusion for people attempting to learn the new specification.
> The decimal system (or more accurately the infinite supply of numbers we have) makes it easy for us to skip a version, with plenty more left for future versions to come.
PHP6 was supposed to be this all-singing all-dancing Unicode support release. It dragged on for years but didn't get finished due to various issues, and in 2008 they decided to just scrap it and roll what they could salvage into 5.3
Since PHP6 died, it made sense to avoid confusion and not name the new major version 6, since we'd then have two different PHP 6es.
This is not unlike what happened with ECMAScript 4.
To be fair there is no perfect language ,especially in dynamic/weakly typed ones. PHP "grew organically", was successful because at the time it came , it was easy enough for hobbyists and non programmers.
It's still the cheapest way to develop web apps and for those who like java patterns they can still upgrade to these because of its class system.
While I wish Ruby or Python would be more popular, they are not as easy to use as PHP(while ironicaly it is easier to go further faster with rails for instance than bare bone PHP),they are not as cheap to deploy too.
There is a natural progression between learning HTML and then adding some server-side behavior , that wasn't met by other solutions (while java has JSP, forced OO makes it too complicated for beginners)
Nevertheless, PHP has excellent libraries , extensions that even some "hotter" languages do not have , I think when people start projects they don't just look at the language but also the ecosystem.
> they are not as easy to use as PHP(while ironically it is easier to go further faster with rails for instance than bare bone PHP)
PHP's frameworks (Laravel, Yii, etc), being based on previous frameworks, are more mature and frankly just better than Rails in most ways, though less integrated with the stack. Which also provides more choice and 'competition' in the PHP ecosystem.
To be generous; starting with plain PHP would be like starting with Ruby, not Rails.
The relation with Rails illustrates how lively the PHP community is. Rails was one big step ahead, PHP copied Rails in a hundred different ways, iterated through that for 3 generations of frameworks and is now well ahead of the simplistic RoR ecosystem.
Ruby is still a better language, but that really doesn't matter unless you project involves writing stuff from scratch.
Agreed on Ruby, and great point about Rails being the one to break new ground in frameworks. I experimented with switching from Laravel to Rails recently, but I was too late to see it as innovative. Like how classic art comes to be cliche by virtue of being the root of its genre.
Try Facebook's Hack if you want all the nice stuff of PHP and modern language features.
PHP still beats the pants out of just about any other language out there in the ease of use department if you want to build websites and is fairly simple to learn. Once people pick up PHP, then they usually start exploring other languages that are more involved and strict.
All this PHP hate is really discouraging to beginners.
>PHP still beats the pants out of just about any other language out there in the ease of use department..
This is not true. Why is it easier than, say, Ruby
>Once people pick up PHP, then they usually start exploring other languages..
But since they are already brainwashed from PHP use, it prevents them from seeing the value of doing thing the proper way, and might see the process as contrived. This is the most dangerous aspect of using PHP. It blocks your learning and understanding. It pulls you down and keep it there.
A good example is the use of PHP arrays. It is a combination of different data structures like list, dictionaries, sets etc. But because it is a combination, you wont be able to use it as a list, or a dictionary or as a set to the fullest extent. And you will be so used to using this for every situation that you might be put off by lack of similar data structures in other languages, and blocks you from seeing the value of using the right one for a particular situation.
So I request every one who is passionate about programming and wants a career in programming to keep away from the php language and community as much as possible.
> But since they are already brainwashed from PHP use, it prevents them from seeing the value of doing thing the proper way, and might see the process as contrived. This is the most dangerous aspect of using PHP. It blocks your learning and understanding. It pulls you down and keep it there.
After 10 years of writing PHP I took a look at Python. I was confused for about 10 minutes, until I read about lists and dictionaries and saw they were different things.
Who are these people who are just trying to write other languages without looking at the "getting started with data structures" page in the guide, or reading a single book?
And why is learning something flexible and easy before learning something more advanced a problem?
> So I request every one who is passionate about programming and wants a career in programming to keep away from the php language and community as much as possible.
I was writing PHP for a living for a decade. I did a bit of Ruby along the way because it's all the same and who cares. I was then invited to CTO at a tech startup in NY, giving me a visa and moving me from the UK.
I replaced their shittily built Rails API with a PHP one which was 3x faster, did 10x more and was actually tested properly. Very handy.
Now I work for another company, Ride.com. We're building an API in Rails and it feels just like the one I built in PHP using Laravel. Almost identical.
This comapny got me a visa known as "The Alien of Extraordinary Ability" in which my PHP code was used as the basis of my skills.
All of this leads me to think: What the fuck are you talking about.
1. Languages rarely matter.
2. PHP is just fine.
3. PHP will not fuck up your career.
4. PHP will not ruin your ability to learn new languages.
5. You are an actual idiot.
Stop preaching ignorance and get on with writing software.
"So I request every one who is passionate about programming and wants a career in programming to keep away from the php language and community as much as possible." <-- keep away from php and focus on (which language)??
"And you will be so used to using this for every situation that you might be put off by lack of similar data structures in other languages" <-- http://php.net/manual/en/spl.datastructures.php
"and blocks you from seeing the value of using the right one for a particular situation." <-- technically, i do think that the average coder who works in javascript/php/ruby/php/(insert other script languages here) fails in using the proper datastructure for the problem
The above code shows php silently converting numeric string keys into integer keys. This ends up breaking the concept of a dictionary and prevents it to be used as a proper dictionary.
Also, These are the following are the functions that are supposed to be used when you want to use an array as a set.
array_diff_assoc
array_diff_key
array_diff_uassoc
array_diff_ukey
array_diff
array_intersect_assoc
array_intersect_key
array_intersect_uassoc
array_intersect_ukey
array_intersect
Consider the fact that arrays can have mixed numeric and string keys, and consider the fact that php converts numeric string keys into integer keys, and consider php weak comparison rules (2=='2'), and how do you feel about using the above functions for set operations?
You see, the php philosophy is to compensate a lack of depth with a whole lot of breadth. Instead of demanding the user to understand different data structures in depth, it provides one data structure that requires very little understanding to get started, and cover the drawbacks of with a number of functions, edge case rules, and undocumented weird behaviors (resulting from different combinations of documented, but unintuitive behaviors).
So the end result is you got away with only having to learn one simple data structure. But if you want to use it reliably, with the provided library functions, you need to keep an encyclopedic knowledge of the aforementioned edge cases gotchas. This is true with a lot of aspects of PHP. PHP is like a cheap-shitty-dangerous car that you can acquire with very little down payment on a loan with a huge interest.
>Javascript work similarly with one combined array/dict type.
Javascript have combined array/dict? How come?
>Also the PHP SPL exists..
It does not matter, People starting with php won't be aware of these pitfalls to go looking into SPL objects.
Ha! Arrays in JS are just objects disguised as arrays, with a fancy prototype and some syntax sugar: no more, no less. There are no _real_ arrays in JS (in the traditional sense).
Keys in JS arrays are _strings_, weird as it is, because arrays are just objects, and objects use strings as keys. Try this yourself:
Numbers are coerced into strings, and not the other way around! (Note that I said 'number' on purpose, since integers are available but rarely used on the web, for BC. So it's usually floats coerced into strings every time you do ['a'][0]).
This weird coertions are not much unlike PHP's, which turns anything you give it as a key into a hash, internally. Though PHP arrays are far more complex, and even weirder (like how are they're not passed as a reference or as copy, but kinda both).
On the face of it you're technically correct, and i've been bitten by numeric string key coercion in the past. But another way of thinking about it is that PHP's combined array/dict implementation is a perfectly valid set/dict, just over a subset of values where 2 and "2" are not really distinct. And clearly this was intentional given all the other parts of the language that treat types weakly.
> This is not true. Why is it easier than, say, Ruby
I can set up hosting for a PHP website without thinking. With Ruby, unless something has changed in the last 6 months (I sure hope it has) it takes me a lot more effort.
Ease of use is the entire ecosystem, not just writing programs in it.
Ruby is just "gem install rails", but IMO this discussion is misguided: initial setup time doesn't make much difference in the long run. If we're talking "how easy can a user get started", JavaScript wins by far. But that doesn't mean I'd recommend people using it.
I disagree with you - "gem install rails" is setting up Rails, but not what I was talking about: hosting the result.
I wonder if PaaS providers like Heroku would have taken off so quickly if Rails apps had been easy to set up the hosting for? It would explain their popularity outside the PHP community.
"Ease of use" often leads to "impossible to maintain". Strictness is one of the best features of any language in the long term, and it rarely results in much more thinking or typing. If you don't know what type you want something to be, you're not designing your code right. Why not let the compiler know while you're at it?
The opposite is also true.I've seen my share of unmaintainable code in Java. The fact that a large number of PHP users aren't developpers but just want to add some code here and there explains why a lot of PHP code is ugly.But if PHP didn't exist and the same people were forced to use java you'd see a lot of horrible JSP code instead ...
Let me rephrase my comment in a more controversial way, but something I absolutely believe from 16 years of experience.
It is impossible to write maintainable code in a dynamic + weakly typed language. Instead, you have to rely on your IDE and unit tests to catch bugs.
That leads to a huge amount of extra surface area: assertions, type checking, error-throwing, etc. In many projects, unit tests become technical debt and no one ever has time to write them! Then you're really screwed.
Within my first 4 years of professional programming I'd already proved you wrong on pretty much all of your points. I'd maintained and extended a large application, written in PHP and Javascript, without the aid of an IDE or unit tests.
That doesn't mean you did it safely or efficiently. Most of the other people on here would be horrified that you didn't have any unit tests. In fact, if you had any sensitive user data in your database, you were doing something absolutely irresponsible.
A few months ago, I drove in NYC on a major, two-way road that had been repaved, but it didn't have white or yellow lines on it yet.
People were driving as fast as usual, and I didn't get into an accident. However, I (and the other drivers) were much less safe because we didn't have those lines.
What you're talking about is driving without the lines and without a seatbelt.
Based on your attitude, my guess is that your first 4 years of professional programming didn't end that long ago. That's fine, and you can believe you're super smart and doing everything right (like I did), but you're going to find out that unit tests are an industry standard for a reason.
Based on the fact that you've never met me, or seen a line of my code, I don't really give a toss.
You are the one who asserted that users of dynamically/weakly typed languages require unit tests, implying that users of staticly/strongly typed languages don't.
Of course some languages are safer than others, more expressive than others, faster than others, or whatever. You asserted that software written in dynamically typed languages is unmaintainable, an assertion that I strongly dispute.
You can write terrible code in any language. The problem is that code in dynamic languages, especially combined with weak typing and no tests, is tremendously harder to refactor without introducing regressions.
"and as long as the rotten core remains" <-- care to explain more on this ?? And while you are explaining that i would like to remind you that there are no perfect languages out there..
Having an optional mode per file allows:
People who want to write code with strict types can do so. People who want to write code with weak types can do so. People who want to write code without these new fangled types can continue to do so.
All without any issues of compatibility between running code on the current version of PHP and what will be the next one, and without any compatibility issues for libraries that are solely written in one mode, being used in applications that are written in the other mode.
\o/
To be honest, I'm completely in the strict camp - but it's awesome that we've gotten a solution that should allow everyone to use the mode they want, without splitting the PHP ecosystem.