alt Hacker NewsAfter over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming.
Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough safety with modern static analysis tools.
I'm not too sure I agree with the author's complaints here. When using something like array_filter, you're typically mapping from collection to collection (i.e. you don't care about the first element--you care about the whole thing) and so this problem is really a non-issue. The next follow up step would usually be foreach, or another operation like array_map, in which case it's a non-issue.
If you really do need the first element, you can use array_first. And if you really do need a fixed-sized collection, you can use SplFixedArray.
The point on properties is valid to an extent, but IMO not really an issue you commonly run into in the real world (regardless of language, your constructors should generally return an object in a usable state).
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Php has compile time safety too but compile time occurs at roughly the same time as runtime lol
All PHP needs is python's flexible and convenient manipulation of lists/dicts/objects. Plus dropping the end semi colon and it would riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip the fabric of spacetime.
yes I say this now very often, that PHP has morphed into runtime Java. Quite nice in some ways.
In PHP though the STDlib is not very well thought out, it may be fun(needle,haystack) or fun(haystack,needle) and you just have to remember
empty() will do weird stuff like a string with the value "0" is also empty, so not great for parsing things.
A lot of footguns and the best way to avoid that is with a decent linter that lets you be picky
another thing I mention is avoiding the array_ stuff because of aformentioned reasons, it's easier to remember/reason about boring loops unfortunately.
Have you tried Lua or one of its variants?
> Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem
I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.
Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
If I have an “array” and can do array[0] to get first item, but when I filter this array and array[0] throws an error, that’s super weird. What is the meaning of [] or what is an array even? The language forces me to understand how it is implemented under the hood. That’s exactly what the author says: leaky abstraction.