PHP gets no love.
Where would it be in the chart? coming off of C or C++?
Where would it be in the chart? coming off of C or C++?
(sorry, couldn't resist :-) )
What problem were they trying to fix?
Everything -> not bundled -> PHP
Perl -> too weird -> PHP
(I don't know how to protect the star from starting an emphasise block. Escaping it doesn't seem to work.)
Sorry to nit-pick, but these may be particularly hard to explain because they're not true.
$x[42] isn't a de-reference at all, but an indexing. (Granted, it's more than a little confusing that it's indexing @x. This is 'fixed' in Perl 6.) $x->[42] is a de-reference, but of $x, not of @x (which isn't a reference anyway (I think unlike in Ruby)). @x and $x are always completely separate; typeglobs allow you to say something like (star)x = \@y, whereupon @x and @y are the same (but still $x and @x are completely different). I suppose you could claim that $x and @x are no longer completely different if you say something like $x = \@x, whereupon $x->[42] and $x[42] mean the same thing.
You're right, "dereference" was a poor choice of words because it means something more specific in Perl. And I think a programmer would need at least a year of experience before they could possibly understand your main paragraph, while PHP was dumbed-down enough to be approachable by amateurs.
… but ends here.
However there is logic in the madness. Perhaps Larry Wall/linguistic logic but none the less it does work! The best explanation i've see is the comment by "Matt S Trout" on devolving-sigils blog post (http://blog.fogus.me/2009/02/26/devolving-sigils/).
Below is the key sentence from mst comment:
Actually, perl sigils don’t denote variable type
– they denote conjugation
– $ is ‘the’, @ is ‘these’, % is ‘map of’ or so
– variable type is denoted via [] or {}.It's been a long time since I listened to the interview, but I think he created PHP to create simple websites. Wikipedia even says the original acronym was "Personal Home Page".