PHP Dark Arts: Sockets | Hacker News Reader

PHP Dark Arts: Sockets

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10 pointsvital10111 comments

I don't mean to be snide, but in what universe is basic socket programming considered a 'dark art'? Has programming as a whole really fallen that far? Socket programming isn't deep or complicated, it is pretty straightforward and most anyone with a vaguely decent amount of programming experience ( 1 year at most from my experience ) should be able to pick up the basic right away.

It's a dark art if you are doing it in PHP...

I've had a few occasions to do socket programming in PHP and I agree, it's a pretty basic, and when you're talking programming in general, a fairly common thing, but I don't think it's something the average PHP developer does very much of.

a: it's in PHP

b: the overall skill level of programmers ranges across several orders of magnitude, amongst the group of folks who are "programmers" or software engineers by job description only a small fraction of them are capable of socket programming without getting well in over their head quickly.

If b is true then I've apparently lead a sheltered life. Every programmer I've worked with, even the ones I could call 'not so good' where able to do socket programming.

PHP Dark Arts: doing something beyond <p>hi there <?php echo $username ?></p>

I know I'll get flamed for this, but that's actually beautifully elegant.

and insecure. Correct version is:

  <?php echo htmlspecialchars($username); ?>

That's so incorrect I don't even know where to start.

I'd like to hear what's incorrect about it.

Do you think values should be escaped before output? Or that usernames don't include chars that need escaping in HTML? Or perhaps you'd add extra filtering to ensure that page cannot become ill-formed due to encoding error? Or perhaps it's incorrect to use PHP at all? ;)

whoa, dark art alert!!

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