Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjamir | Hacker News Reader

A language that changes the semantics of functions between minor versions has no "right way". "count()"less examples of crap. I have currently two weeks of code migration behind me because code running correctly on 7.0 fails on 7.3 -- while I see the reason for change was necessary I also see the hopelessness of rebuilding a flawed house with a fundament build on a pile of manure.

And the good news given to me by a colleague is that they pulled the same stunt going from 7.3 to 7.4. It's like depending on stumbling alcoholics instead of language designers.

Not much has changed since core devs tried to mitigate an overflow by testing for "$variable < MAXINT".

View on HN

I was curious about this rant since I'm maintaning a number of PHP projects and I haven't had any issues with "count".

In the Changelog section of the "count" docs at https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.count.php we find:

> 7.2.0 - count() will now yield a warning on invalid countable types passed to the value parameter.

So in 7.2.0 they started raising a warning in cases where the application was doing a stupid thing (calling count on a non-countable object). Notice that PHP's warnings won't stop execution by default. The expected side-effect here is that you get a warning in the logs and everything keeps working normally. Of course, many development setups halt execution on warnings, but this is a decision that devs make to "force" them to writte better code, not something enforced by PHP itself.

> 8.0.0 - count() will now throw TypeError on invalid countable types passed to the value parameter.

In the next major version, they turned the warning into an error. Pretty understandable way to improve the language I would say. Of course it would've been better if this was an error from the beginning, but given a mistake was made here, this is definitely the best way to correct it I can think of.

I'm sorry it took time for you to fix the legacy apps you've inherited. However, calling this out as an example of bad programming language evolution seems very wrong to me. I for one would LOVE that all languages and libraries in my project's dependency chains where as dilligent as in this example.

> In the next major version, they turned the warning into an error. Pretty understandable way to improve the language I would say.

Breaking changes (at runtime no less) are the worst way to improve any language. They should have created a new count method if they wanted to change behavior in a breaking way. Forcing millions of developers to comb through their code just because some designer doesn't like the way someone else does something is just narcissistic.

p.s. Semver isn't worth the shit paper its printed on, it can't even version itself and all it does is give shit developers shit excuses to impose their own naval gazing induced shitstorms on other developers.

I don't think that having two different count()s with different edge-case behavior is the way it should've been improved. If someone used the method incorrectly in the past it's part their fault for writing it incorrectly and part PHP's that it didn't fail (and "fail" is also kind of a stretch since the behavior was described in the docs IIRC).

Does PHP say it follows SemVer? I don't know as I don't use it but Python doesn't.

For the most part. However one person's bug is another person's feature and given the huge number of PHP users, where many aren't formally trained developers the ways in which PHP is (ab-)used is manifold. Thus sometimes things slip through as Bugfix, which then annoy people. But over recent times PHP got a lot better (maybe since I'm not involved anymore)

If you upgrade without proper testing you are the only one to blame. Seems like that blaming PHP is just an excuse for poorly managing language upgrades.

PHP has one of the best track records for retrocompatibility, this is really the worst thing you could pick to blame PHP for something.

Some of the major criticisms most frequently leveled at PHP relate it's convoluted history, the random ad hoc nature of their built-in functions, the inability to enforce types, overly flexible/dynamic, etc all of which can contribute to, among other things, disorganized code.

But then when PHP does something positive to clean things up, we get threads like this. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

FWIW, how PHP handled `count` was very well done IMHO. The evolution from having `count` throw a warning on non-countable objects to having `count` throw a TypeError has occurred over several years! No one should have been caught off-guard by this very gradual change.

Perhaps ironically, this attitude towards backwards compatibility is a big part of what held PHP back for so many years and part of the reason why PHP 6 was abandoned during development and PHP 7 used none/almost none of that work.

Instead of introducing a warning and informing the community that a feature was going to change or be removed in an upcoming major update, for years PHP just added new functions. You ended up with `mysql` and then `mysqli`. You ended up with the `mb_*` functions. And in order for developers to properly interface with all of these duplicate functions that may or may not be installed on your system, you ended up with jQuery-like libraries that would wrap certain portions of the PHP language and try to make them easier to work with. The comments on this (and most PHP posts on HN in general) are pretty crappy in large part because of decisions like this. It's also why the language basically died for like half a decade in the late 00s.

It's an absurd way for a language to evolve. At some point, you MUST fix the issues break backwards compatibility. You put out documentation and upgrade guides instructing developers on what needs to be done to facilitate the change. And as developers, we accept that we need to make sure we check that documentation before upgrading and in exchange, we get a better experience for developing new applications in the future.

> And as developers, we accept that we need to make sure we check that documentation before upgrading

Not everyone does. I think I've read a couple times how people commented that Python2->3 was the worst decision made by Guido. (I'm personally grateful that Py3 makes unicode default and more sane than Py2)

With every compatibility breaking release, you run the risk of splitting the language into two. Perl suffered that fate (though not only for that reason), and Python almost did (Py2 is still used in so many places 14 years after Py3 was released in 2008).

This is true. You see this happen all the time with frameworks where the community splinters because of a major change. It doesn't happen as often with languages (perhaps because the average developer feels more removed from the development of those?), but as you pointed out, it does occur.

I think one of the differences here is how active the PHP community is. The Core devs are constantly taking ideas from the community and working those into or out of their plans for the future. They have open periods of discussion for any RFC and will engage with questions and concerns on Twitter and GitHub and Reddit and various other places. Those RFCs are voted on by 30+ different team members and requires a super majority to pass. Everything is transparent. Everything is discussed.

It's not perfect by any means (and the PHP-FIG standards group operated similarly and still splintered due in large part to egos), but it's not as one-sided as other languages and if you engage yourself in the community, you'll generally know what is coming and at least be able to voice your opinion in a forum that will be listened to.

Totally agree. This is beyond taste or preference.

Yes you can build a great app in PHP. But so you can in Kotlin or Ruby or ...

Yes some have a career by starting with PHP. But that does not make it a good language for beginners. Same can be said (and to me is verrrry true) fro JavaScript.

Language design matters. It shapes how you think about code. Talk to people who've learned AND USED many languages including some esoteric ones like Haskell, a LISP or OCaml. Then see what they have to say PHP and JS for beginners.

For me, a "beginner friendly language" has these properties:

* A welcoming, helping and open community.

* Built-in guidance or enforcement away from The Wrong Way and towards The Right Way. E.g. by making the former hard to do and the latter easy.

* Ecosystem of high-quality, properly designed libraries and sample code.

I see this in e.g. Rust. But e.g. JavaScript or PHP fail on all my three points. As does my main language, Ruby, sadly.

While I agree on your three points, I don't think I would recommend Rust to a beginner developer.

Me neither.

And I'm still not certain why not. You'll have a "hello world" in minutes. Even through something like Actix. Probably faster than your average "ruby on rails hello-world" or "react hello world". As those require a lot of up-front tooling to be set up.

I guess my reluctance is that Rust very early on requires knowledge of memory-management (borrower) and intricacies such as Result and Option.

While those are good to learn for a beginner at some point, that beginner probably wants to defer them to a moment that they have actual software deployed and dabble into multithreading, get runtime exceptions back and see the software crashing.

Still, I think languages that don't even allow you to think about such stuff, like Python, Ruby or JS, do the beginner a disservice: typing, shared-memory, runtime exceptions and undefined behaviour are a real thing, and a beginner should at least see that the libraries and examples all take these issues into consideration. Instead of waving it away with "we have tests to cover most of it. probably"

I'm Ruby dev, I deal with this daily; Learning Rust and using it in production has made me a much better Ruby dev.

#2: Strict Programming lang's. I often seen frustrate new programmers, specially young new programmers making them want to give up on programming all together so I don't know if I would call that beginner friendly, I certainly would not call rust beginner friendly

I guess however we would need to define what a "beginner" target is, are we talking adults that want to learn programmed to change fields, or children wanting to inspire them to peruse programming as a career, or someone between the 2 groups

If you want to learn programming, knowing how to use type systems is valuable skill from day one.

For children see this (very different objectives indeed):

https://www.rollapp.com/app/kturtle

You are right of course. The thing that many people miss is that learning isn't just one thing from, say, Hello World to a fully fledged application but it involves learning diferent types of things in different orders.

For example, going straight-to-web can be hard since it involves several different concepts HTML is not CSS is not JS is not backend code (mostly!). So it is sometimes better to teach the basics in a desktop or console app using a single language with a single paradigm. Once they understand that, you could introduce other abstractions and explain why sometimes strong type-checking is useful and other times it is unecessary and time-wasting.

While I can understand that approach, I do wonder if my origin to programming is common or not. I did not get in to programming to become a programmer.

I learned programming to solve a problem I was having, in my case I did start out in web development in the 90's. I wanted a website that did something that I could not find premade software that did it in the way I wanted so I wrote my own. I also learned of open source and and other communities via this process.

Had I just stuck with the commercial software solution I bought, that was terrible, I would have missed out on on a skill I eventually learned to love.

The website (and company around it) I built was never successful, but from that experience I learned a skill that carried me to the career I now have

Like sibling comments mention, "beginner" is a broad definition.

I was thinking about someone from school taking their first job. Or someone who has built a WordPress site and theme as a hobby and so on. I was not thinking about a 7-year old wanting to move a turtle around. Nor about an "arts student" looking if she may like webdev.

Though, a friend who has an after-school "tech" afternoon for young kids, includes a lot of arduino, adafruit and other hardware courses. Kids love it when some robot drives around the actual world, drawing lines. More than a virtual turtle drawing virtual lines. It requires C programming. He told me he has 8-year old kids writing some C.

> Same can be said (and to me is verrrry true) fro JavaScript. Not if you use JS like Scheme: https://www.crockford.com/little.html

In fact JS is much more pleasant to write than PHP, the main reason to move way from PHP after using it for over 10 years.

I guess it's a matter of preference because I find writing Javascript tedious, the forced async when not needed, or that for some reason Node doesn't give me a line and a description when I make a mistake, it just ... fails?

JavaScript: the language that can barely understand itself is better than PHP! The language, where JetBrain's IDE (arguably one of the best IDEs when it comes to understanding languages, consistently better than any LSPs among other things) can barely understand it fully, is better than PHP! The language that has consistently added new features, but have yet to fix horrible messes of legacy design.

The majority of Gary Bernhardt's 2012 talk "wat"[0] is still relevant today with JavaScript. PHP's devs at least are actively trying to address the majority of issues people have had problems with, and have done so successfully for many of the issues it had.

In my opinion the only thing JavaScript has going for it over PHP is its ability to develop frontend and backend code using the same language, but then, you know, you'll need a million NPM dependencies if you pull in some of the simplest packages.

Until TypeScript takes over JavaScript I refuse to believe anyone who understands either languages fully prefers JS over PHP. I've yet to dabble in Deno, but I'm hoping that it also addresses much of the issues with JS, but I'm doubtful since it's also based on V8.

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat

The linked talk is soo true and so hilarious.

It can't fix its legacy design for backward compatibility reasons in browsers

Elixir is one such language for beginners.

Also a lot of the positive changes were do to the efforts of Nikita Popov[1] who has now left. It's led to the creation of the PHP foundation.[2] I haven't kept up to date with the foundation's efforts.

[1]:https://www.npopov.com/aboutMe.html

[2]:https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundati...

Nikita is a beast, one of the smartests guys around.

I wish I was half as smart as he is.

PHP versions don’t follow semver.

And yes, it’s ok. Semver not a silver bullet.

PHP doesn't guarantee backward compatibility between minor version. It is the way things are in PHP since 5.x, when Semver wasn't even a thing.

I assume then that you disqualify Python for the same reason?

Python 3.x has decided that breaking changes in minor releases is fine. My favourite: string prefixes (eg s'foo', u'foo') were legal in 2.x, removed in 3.0, added back in 3.3. There are other subtle breakages (eg open() flags).

Hating on PHP is a tired cliche at this point.

>Python 3.x has decided that breaking changes in minor releases is fine. My favourite: string prefixes (eg s'foo', u'foo') were legal in 2.x, removed in 3.0, added back in 3.3.

Python 3.0 was very much not a minor release, so your example is invalid.

The general point that Python does breaking changes in minor releases stands, but they do typically go through a deprecation period first.

I've upgraded quite a few PHP systems, and 7.2 was the major stumbling block that I've seen for most projects. Which "changes the semantics of functions between minor versions" are you referring to? In the 7.0 update there was the changing of order that e.g. $foo[bar]->boom[baz] would be evaluated, but obviously that isn't your complaint.

https://getrector.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com