The thing I hate about php is the inconsistency and unpredictability for new-to-php developers.
camelCase? snake_case? nocase? Who knows what the global function will be.
And who knows what order the arguments should go in. Sometimes the array is first, sometimes not (in array iterating functions like map).
The thing that got my goat the most however was that referencing an undefined variable merely caused a warning, but referencing an undefined key in an array borked it.
And what's with arrays and maps being the same thing?!
FYI when you start a PHP project you need to change your dev machine php.ini to be super strict, so all warrnings should just error out.
The inconsistency seems to have it's logic and at that time was consistent and made sense, you need a good IDE to help with this. Using PHPStorm and then using PHPDoc to define your functions parameters and return type is a joy, the IDE will catch your type mistakes, show you where you missed to catch an exception and it will code complete stuff.
It never made sense. The original hash bucketing mechanism for the function lookup in PHP was the length of the name of the function, so each new function was named a specific length to ensure the function list was evenly distributed across the hash table.
Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a
very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the
function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash
distribution of function names across the various function name lengths
names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length
bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own
personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember
the few function names.
Thanks for the tips! I suspect PHPStorm/Doc may be the only one that flies for the legacy codebase I sometimes get involved with - turning warnings into errors would be suicidal...
You don't turn warnings into error on production but it will help to have them enabled on your local machine, otherwise errors are ignored and you would waste your time debugging weird issues. You can do this per file too using the "ini_set" https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.ini-set.php
camelCase? snake_case? nocase? Who knows what the global function will be.
And who knows what order the arguments should go in. Sometimes the array is first, sometimes not (in array iterating functions like map).
The thing that got my goat the most however was that referencing an undefined variable merely caused a warning, but referencing an undefined key in an array borked it.
And what's with arrays and maps being the same thing?!