Hacker News Reader

Comment by scandinavian | Hacker News Reader

    php > echo count(get_defined_functions(TRUE)['internal']);
    1196

They should clean up the global name space, but that will never happen, so I'll continue not using PHP.

View on HN

While parent's comment seems to attract some downvotes, there is a good point hidden beneath: PHP (mostly) keeps backward compatibility. This means that old and unsafe functions that should not be used anymore are not removed from the language and are still available to use.

Coupled with a lot of outdated documentation and tutorials that advocate using these functions, it becomes a big issue. For example, many tutorials use "==" when "===" should be the default. Deprecated functions are used in many tutorials as well.

Why does the number of methods in the global namespace bother you?

* Genuinely interested in the rationale behind this. Sure, it's a lot, but why does that matter?

Why the downvote? This is a genuine question!

Complaints like this one make PHP seem perfect.

Yeah and they should add basic features like lambdas and rewrite the entire standard library to support that while they are at it and when they are done with all of that could they potentially provide a separate syntax similar to facebook's reason? It's no longer the same language anymore if you change everything and therefore there is no reason to waste time improving PHP.

PHP has had lambdas for years, and the next major version has a concise syntax similar to JS arrow functions.

I'm sensing some sarcasm but that unironicly sounds like a good idea to me.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com