Comment by sirwitti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sirwitti | Hacker News Reader

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> Such as call-by-reference only working 2 recursions deep.

Which smells like an anti-pattern to me. Blaming bad code on the language is one way to deal with it.

> Arbitrary decisions and namings on stdlib.

This is absolutely true and even more annoying I find that the ordering of stdlib arguments is inconsistent. Backwards-compatibility is one of the reasons this has not changed, I guess.

What I don't understand is, why people don't apply that same legitimate criticism to python. I recently had to do a project in python and was astounded by the amount of arbitrary namings and design choices.

I also agree that many php codebases, especially if not written in a good framework, are a hot mess.

That being said, the ecosystem if using decent frameworks with php 8+ versions very productive in terms of time vs results and a joy to work with.

> What I don't understand is, why people don't apply that same legitimate criticism to python. I recently had to do a project in python and was astounded by the amount of arbitrary namings and design choices.

I absolutely do. I appreciate the PHP community for having expertise in actually creating sane tools attempting to do a good job. But Python is just batshit crazy with some of the most wild bugs I have seen and no guardrails whatsoever.

Out of all the languages which got a type-system after the fact, PHP is the best one hands down. Runtime-validation of types + non-null by default keeps some of the bad stuff inside Pandora's box.

> Which smells like an anti-pattern to me. Blaming bad code on the language is one way to deal with it.

It was a simple recursive algorithm which we used to make some custom-highlighting on a few select words (much easier to understand than an equivalent iterative approach). But I wasted a good day until I saw that there was a technological limitation which made the algorithm fall apart, and not the logic itself. That's a quite offputting smell.

Of course I understand the economic choice behind PHP... finding PHP programmers is cheaper than going C# or Java. But having a good background in parallelism and having a good grasp on efficient CPU/JVM usage PHP doesn't provide anything unique. Everything it provides, I can achieve equally fast in other established languages, while posing an actual problem when technological limits are reached.

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