zlacker

>>TimWol+(OP)
The worst part about PHP is constantly hearing from its detractors, who are often people who haven’t used the language in many years. Haystack needle order, $, fractal of bad design, it just gets old.

The language isn’t perfect but I love working with it, these 8.1 and 8.2 improvements have really made it sweet.

My biggest gripe at the moment is the (very old) behavior of e.g. preg_match() and sort(). You’ve got a small handful of these common functions that operate on their input by reference/in place which is gross. A new version of these would be welcome.

>>user39+j7
Have you considered that these "detractors" might just be former users of the language themselves, who felt liberated once they tried something else, and want to help other people not feel stuck as well?

>>felipe+to
Right but if someone stomped in here talking shit about for example javascript's verbose function notation, poor linting tools, and lack of type checker we'd be like what year are you from? We all got burned by that stuff, we all hated it circa 2016, it's all been addressed now. Javascript still has problems but those aren't it and any conversation about it includes that nuance.

Php is in a very similar situation, the difference is you can't escape javascript so we all to some extent keep up with its developments. People who leave php left it at a certain point and their understanding of its issues is frozen there. It's very predictable and boring honestly.

>>giraff+8u
Since when does PHP not have $?

>>xigoi+B81
What's the problem with '$'?

>>nerdbe+Wc1
For me, it makes code harder to read because my brain can't stop pronouncing it as “s”, so something like `f($x, $y, $z)` reads like “eff sex, swy, szee”. And for writing, requiring a shifted key before every identifier is a lot of pinky strain. Not to mention that it's completely useless noise.

>>xigoi+We1
But it lets you do things that are absolutely wild without weird syntax or setting up reflection. $obj->$dynamic_var. Or $$dynamic_obj->$dynamic_fun().

Whether or not you should be doing that is another matter… but it’s useful in some cases and easier to grok than using reflection or using array syntax on an object (like JavaScript).

After awhile, you don’t even notice the $ to be honest.