PHP Hater

explode()

Thu, 13 Dec 2012 13:08:00 -0500

My head explodes when I see this. I can the naming is to avoid conflicting with the deprecated split() , which was yet another brilliant idea.

Annotation

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 09:37:47 -0400

As if the whole language being a pile of hacks is not enough, PHP community (if there is such thing can be called a community) came up with this idea: let’s use comment to mark functionality!

I’ve personally seen this idea in production. But I wasn’t sure what to make of it until this dude spelled it all out.

Borrowing his tl;dr: code comments should never have an effect on application on functionality or flow.

htmlspecialchars()

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 09:01:02 -0400

From a PHP book, introducing htmlspecialchars():

"Before long, you’ll find its use becomes second nature."

As a language created for the web, not much thought went into security in PHP. Therefore the burden is on the user, forever.

PHP As A Templating Language

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:37:00 -0400

People credit PHP’s ability to blend-in with HTML as one of the most important reason for it’s popularity. So I contemplated it as a templating language today.

Turns out, PHP is not anywhere near an impressive templating language after all.

To me, the deal breaker is its inability to achieve template inheritance, something Python web developers take granted for. In Jinja2 or Django’s templating language, a template can “implement” blocks declared in its parent template, whose code is shared among its children. To the controllers, this mechanism is completely hidden, so they simply use those “child” templates to render everything, as if they are full-fledged templates.

With PHP, intuitively, similar functionality can be done with ‘include’ & co. You can take one of two approaches:

Top-down. Use a variable in place of the content of the “child” template, determine which child template is need and pass it to the parent template.
Bottom-up. Break up the repeated (“parent”) code and include them as needed in the actual content. Of course you’ll need at least 2 “include”s (a header and a footer) in the simplest case

Either way, you get one level of “inheritance” done.

To be fair though, a library is all that’s need to bring PHP back into the game.

Appending elements to array

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:23:10 -0400

This is a fun one.

To add an new element to an array, you do

$some_array[] = “new thing”;

Speaking of borrowing syntax from C, this is very innovative.

Namespace

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 19:37:48 -0400

I started with PHP 5.4.4, so the 15 years (1994-2009) it took for namespace to arrive didn’t affect me at all.

However,

backslashes, really?

Oh it’s just like file paths, in MS Windows!

Base Conversion

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 02:41:00 -0400

On a second look, the integer base conversion utilities provided by PHP is actually pretty practical. So this may belong to hypercritical territory.

The issues always come down to interface. For example, parsing hexadecimal, octal or binary strings to integer with hexdec(), octdec() and bindec() does cover the common cases succinctly, but this interface is far from being elegant.

These three functions each has a counterpart that converts an integer to a string corresponding to its base. However, the same thing can be accomplished by base_convert(), if you allow a little integer-to-string magic happen for the first passed argument.

TL;DR: practical, ugly, redundant.

strtotime()

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:35:51 -0400

strtotime() converts string to PHP objects representing time. Without a doubt, this is a powerful feature in PHP.

In fact, it is so magical that nobody can list off all the formats it understands. Of course there’s a four-part manual that explains it in whole. Just memorize that and you’ll be sure your time string is acceptable for strtotime()!

mt_rand()

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 12:36:06 -0400

This is truly random.

Besides rand(), PHP has another function that generates random integers: mt_rand(). The latter takes advantage of a algorithm called Mersenne Twister which is more effective/less efficient than the generator in libc, which rand() uses.

Language interface polluted with implementation details in a irreplaceable way? That’s a good reason to hate.