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Comment by cgranade | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see similar lists for other languages. I've been coding in MATLAB as of late, for instance, and rediscovered my hatred for the fact that you can't index the output of a function without assigning to a temporary variable. For instance, `foo(args)(:)` causes an error. You have to use `X = foo(args); X(:)` instead. That makes me just as sad as some of these PHP sadnesses.

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MATLAB does get one thing right: Function arguments are always passed by value. This "referential transparency" really makes it easier to reason about functions and test them.

It's the one thing I hate about SciPy.

Passing by reference for performance reasons should be automatically handled by the compiler. I.e., A=sort(A) should be handled in-place without requiring a new function sort!(A).

I'm not so sure I agree. Python in general is very consistent about pass-by-value versus pass-by-reference semantics, whereas MATLAB infers things in ways that are far from transparent. Look at, for instance, the way the `parfor` loop construct differentiates between "broadcast," "sliced" and other such variables, and how fragile that inference is. Maybe I haven't thought clearly enough about this particular issue, but I don't think of MATLAB as being transparent.

Yes. Though Matlab has gotten massively better in recent years. It's just that the defaults, for backwards compatibility are still The Wrong Thing (TM). Look at function handles, and cells for string handling.

That's called array dereferencing. It doesn't work in php either, you need to assign to a temporary variable. I've been following a patch in the works (at https://wiki.php.net/rfc/functionarraydereferencing ) but there doesn't seem to be much progress on it.

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