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Comment by leftnode | Hacker News Reader

I ask this question as well. I work mostly with PHP developers and it's telling most of them don't have an answer or only say "consistent function argument order".

If you claim to have 7+ years using a language, surely there's a list of things you could add to make it better.

I think it's standard in the PHP ecosystem though.

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Oddly enough in PHP the things I find most annoying aren't the inconsistent method names or parameter order. I can live with those as the documentation is pretty good and most IDE's give me a hint as to what its expecting.

The thing I find most annoying is being unable to pop the first element off an array when its returned and that when you do things like array_map it dosn't work with a method inside the same or other classes,

$this->method()[0];

array_map($this->doSomething, $array);

    list($firstElement) = $this->method();
    array_map(array($this, 'doSomething'), $array);

Yes, neither is intuitive. And the syntax sucks. And it's not as easy to read (except sometimes where a method returns a tuple; `list` is wonderful there!). But it's certainly possible...

There are plans for this[1] but it seems to be on/off - currently the RFC is 'accepted' - not sure when it's being introduced though (I believe there was a patch). It's certainly something I want, I come across this all the time.

[1]: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/functionarraydereferencing

Definitely (and as other posters have mentioned, it is in/out of the works). I'd expect some developers applying for a senior development position to have similar opinions.

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