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Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

The most annoying thing you encouter daily in PHP is the needle/haystack problem. There is no consistency with parameters of the standard library. It could be fixed in two ways:

a) Make everything an object, where methods can be called on:

   $arr = [];
   $arr->key_exists('key');

b) Create a new class-based standard library, where you call those functions statically and needle/haystack are always in the same place:

   Arr::key_exists($arr, 'key');

Either way, you can deprecated all the array_..., str_..., etc. functions and end the guessing game. Other than that PHP is turning out great.

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Laravel’s “Collections” library [1] solves this, and is a breath of fresh air. Easily one of the best features of the framework (though you can also use it as a separate package, outside of a Laravel app [2]).

It’s simple to use, but extremely powerful. I pretty much always use Collections over native array functions these days.

[1] https://laravel.com/docs/9.x/collections

[2] https://github.com/illuminate/collections

Doctrine Collections similarly solves this.

This is so funny to me how it's constantly brought up here but has never been an inconvenience to me, and I started with PHP3 in 1998.

Even before auto-completion I guess I would just read the docs.

To each his own I guess.

I am sure that if you use a language/library for long enough, its bad design descisions aren't a huge problem to you.

Reading the docs of course helps, but it is still inconvenience and waste of time to check inconsistent parameter order and function naming from docs. I don't understand why people are so keen on defending these things.

It really is irrelevant nowadays, with a) all IDEs showing you the required parameters as you type, and b) with named parameters.

That was fixed already.

https://wiki.php.net/rfc/named_params

That's a good addition but not really a fix. A fix would be to have a consistent ordering of parameters and a conceptually consistent interface.

I'm suggesting to use https://github.com/azjezz/psl nice wrapper on php std library

There is actually some consistency, array functions have the same parameter order and string functions have theirs, it just different order between these two groups of functions.

> array functions have the same parameter order and string functions have theirs

Except when they have different order :)

  array_filter(array $array, ?callable $callback = null, int $mode = 0): array
  array_map(?callable $callback, array $array, array ...$arrays): array

alternatively, they could add calling functions with keyword arguments as in python, where you'd call key_exists(needle="needle", haystack="haystack")

Userland frameworks/libs provide those kinds of helper classes already.

And IDEs completely solve the problem of knowing parameter orders by hinting them as you type the functions.

This really isn't that big of a deal.

I would like it to look pretty.

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