PHP5's Successor Might Be PHP7

[Luke_Wolf]

If you know you don't want the "broken" behaviour just use the === operator? Seems to work for everyone else.

yes because I should use a hack to get around broken behavior. Have you ever heard the phrase "Don't Live with Broken Windows"? PHP apparently hasn't or this (and many other things) would have been fixed a long time ago instead of adding a new operator as a hack around. There's a reason I avoid this language when I can.

[psychoticmeow]

yes because I should use a hack to get around broken behavior. Have you ever heard the phrase "Don't Live with Broken Windows"? PHP apparently hasn't or this (and many other things) would have been fixed a long time ago instead of adding a new operator as a hack around. There's a reason I avoid this language when I can.

I think it's amusing that you think this is a serious problem.

[Remdul]

[citation needed]

Just to clarify: those numbers are my own estimate, based on what code I've seen over the last 12 years.

[Luke_Wolf]

I think it's amusing that you think this is a serious problem.

Living with broken windows is a serious problem, it promotes duct tape fixes as opposed to properly engineered solutions creating technical debt. Duct tape ends up layering on top of duct tape until you've finally accumulated enough technical debt that you need to completely throw out and rethink the fundamental design of the system. Worse is when you have other systems reliant upon the duct taped system as the technical debt then spreads like the disease it is and it becomes that much harder and that much more expensive to remove the debt from the system even though you eventually will be forced to do so.

[psychoticmeow]

Living with broken windows is a serious problem, it promotes duct tape fixes as opposed to properly engineered solutions creating technical debt. Duct tape ends up layering on top of duct tape until you've finally accumulated enough technical debt that you need to completely throw out and rethink the fundamental design of the system. Worse is when you have other systems reliant upon the duct taped system as the technical debt then spreads like the disease it is and it becomes that much harder and that much more expensive to remove the debt from the system even though you eventually will be forced to do so.

What a bunch of meaningless nonsense. The problem here is your understanding of the operator, not the operator itself.

[Luke_Wolf]

What a bunch of meaningless nonsense. The problem here is your understanding of the operator, not the operator itself.

No it's with the operator itself which is why just like Javascript there's a giant "Do Not Use" sign on it and they came up with the ===, operator (much like javascript). I'm sorry but if you can't see the problem with this and the other technical debt issues, and indeed the very problem with living with broken windows then you are very much beyond help and there's no point wasting my breath further on you.

[psychoticmeow]

No it's with the operator itself which is why just like Javascript there's a giant "Do Not Use" sign on it and they came up with the ===, operator (much like javascript). I'm sorry but if you can't see the problem with this and the other technical debt issues, and indeed the very problem with living with broken windows then you are very much beyond help and there's no point wasting my breath further on you.

Yes, if you do not understand how something works then "Do Not Use" is definitely good advice. You're picking on a teeny tiny problem and making a proverbial mountain out of it all the while being a condescending shit. I'd have no problem with that last bit if you could actually demonstrate knowing what the fuck you're talking about.

[Michael_S]

I really think Perl developers need to do something like this -- just admit that they bit off too much and take another run at it.

That's an interesting suggestion. I've read some interesting articles asserting that Perl6 is the biggest reason Perl's popularity is in decline: a lot of individuals and companies postponed new Perl5 products so they could use Perl6, and then got sick of waiting and switched to another language.

It seems that people here talking bullcrap about the language havent played with it since version 4. Please inform your selfs before... the language now even supports namespaces, closures, generators, etc... pretty up to date for me. Theres even a framework for async stuff like nodejs named reactphp. Also hhvm has evolved the language with scalar type hinting and class templates. At leasr scalar type hinting is going to make it into php 5.7. In any case I agree with othe poster that next release should just be 5.7 and 7.0 when they add jit to phpng which is the 5.7 branch

The language has a ton of annoying quirks that can trap the unwary, just like Javascript. And just like Javascript, it's extremely common and despite all of the headaches there is a colossal amount of useful software written in it. We sit around and lampoon PHP while Facebook uses it in their front end for half a billion people a day. Tumblr was originally written in it. Wordpress, Drupal, forum software, etc...

[profoundWHALE]

If you know you don't want the "broken" behaviour just use the === operator? Seems to work for everyone else.

The point I believe is that PHP is fundamentally flawed in a way that causes all sorts of headaches unless you memorize every 'gotcha' that it has.

Still, as far as I know PHP is still really quite slow so it makes me wonder why this is even an issue in the first place. Not saying hat it doesn't serve it's purpose, just that there are other languages with less of these 'gotchas' that can do the same thing and faster.

[DrYak]

'0' and 0 are equivalent
'0' and 'foo' are not equivalent
so logically 0 and 'foo' are not equivalent... except in PHP they bizarrely are. 0 == 'foo'. *scratches head*

I see your point, but on the other hand, if you reach a situation where you actually need to compare numerical 0 with string 'foo' and need a meaningful answer, then maybe you have other more pressing problems.
Problems which don't have much to do with "PHP is shitty language" and have more root cause in "I can't design a decent and secure code path that doesn't look like stolen straight out of the asylium".
Things like "input validation" do exist for a reason.