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Comment by gmedel | Hacker News Reader

To standardize PHP code is good, let's be clear... There's a lot of "misbehaves" in PHP. And if you're not casting or checking all the time you can get a wrong result, without even knowing. At least now/then (it's an old topic) number_format WILL tell you that you're not formatting a number and that's GOOD.

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To standardize PHP is to create a new language not named PHP.

If you read it until the end you will find out that the technical support representative talking to the irate customer is the creator of PHP. As the creator, PHP can be whatever he decides he wants it to be.

And he has decided it is not a standardized language, by any stretch of the imagination. That's the guy's point, and it's spot-on.

As an aside, I didn't realize there would be people on HN who wouldn't recognize rasmus@php.net immediately.

While there are some industry veterans here, there are also a good amount of CS students and other beginners. I myself didn't know who he was until I got to the end of the article.

PHP can be whatever he decides he wants it to be

What you're describing is whimsical, not standardized.

So what exactly is the point of PHP then? If you want to write Java, write Java.

If PHP has any place in the world at all, it's as a language for the web with a minimum of extraneous boilerplate. If it fails at that goal, well, wtf? If you're going to be all proper about things, why not just do it in Python or some other sane language?

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