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Comment by bl4k | Hacker News Reader

A lot of misinformation in this post. Perl pointers? The Perl hash is the same as the PHP assoc. array (thats where they got it from). PHP has both lambda's and method chaining (method chaining isn't a lang feature).

confusing language and platform/framework - "the language now requires modification by a framework to do what you need." and "I want a language that assumes everything I will be building is an MVC web app, and builds that right into the core language, not just a library.". yikes.

Not sure what else to believe in this article after spotting basic errors (not to mention terrible cliches, assumptions, no background or references etc. and statements like this - "nowadays it doesn't feel like you're doing it properly these days")

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You're the second person to mention that perl doesn't have pointers; references are not strictly speaking pointers but functionally very similar. I think it's pretty obvious those are what I was referring to, and disputing the naming seems like nit-picking.

Many of PHP's basic functions do not return objects, therefore method chaining frequently doesn't work. It would have been more correct to say that I want "everything is an object" to be a feature of the language.

Lambdas only recently turned up in PHP (though I'm pleased to see them!). My point is that in PHP these features are being shoehorned in late in life, and it seems like a language which was designed with the expectation of these features would be a better choice at this point.

And finally, yes, I want a language that assumes everything I will be building is an MVC web app, and builds the necessary infrastructure at the language level, with the performance and stability gains that implies, rather than having it built as a framework on top of the language. It seems weird, I realize, but no more weird than PHP seemed in 1995, with its assumption that everything you'd be writing was a web page.

references are not strictly speaking pointers but functionally very similar

I have more than a passing familiarity with C and Perl. References and pointers are very different. For example, you have to know where you allocated the memory pointed to to work with pointers effectively. You can also lie to the compiler about the type of pointer. You can also do math with pointers.

These are very useful things to do in C (or assembly or C++ or whichever languages give you access to raw memory), but you don't have to do any of those things in Perl because you don't have access to raw memory.

Similarly you can get into a circular reference situation with references that you won't normally find in C unless you have a specific type of garbage collector.

disputing the naming seems like nit-picking

Accuracy is important in programming. The difference between lightning and lightning bugs is not merely degree.

I just finished reading past "Forward Ruby on Rails". I started writing down couter-points, and realized my list was longer than your article - so I deleted it to tell you this:

You seriously need to edit this post, or just take it down.

Hmm,

I'm starting to think that "confusion" can defined as "repeatedly expecting people will do what you think they should do after seeing they don't"

In this sense, thinking language and platform can be glibly separated is the approach that looks confused given the present era. Languages live or die today based on their default platform, their example code, their default programming style, etc..

Part of this is that large changes in group behavior are actually easier than small changes. Will we improve our Perl/C++/VB style - heck no, we're used to doing it our way. Will we learn a whole language with a whole new style? Maybe, especially if it can be sold as the sexy-secret-source. So talking about the whole package is realist if not literally accurate.

> The Perl hash is the same as the PHP assoc. array...

Perl has real arrays as well as hashes, though. PHP only has one object which acts as both.

> PHP has both lambda's

create_function() isn't really a lambda: the created function isn't bound to the local variable namespace that it was defined in.

no php has native lambdas and closures since 5.3.

Fair enough! (http://php.net/manual/en/functions.anonymous.php) Still, it's taken them a long time to add that.

Yeah ... after all that I'd stop and think if a complete rewrite is really necessary or if I should maybe bring somebody in who know RoR and fix what I've fucked up.

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