Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

If there was a contest, then PHP takes first prize. Whatever they're doing with community-driven examples is a mess and should be removed permanently.

For those unaware, you can submit example suggestions for functions in PHP. The majority are being down voted for being garbage.

View on HN

Community-driven suggestions are great when they are correct and/or useful enough, which sadly haven't been for years in the case of PHP. I believe the official documentation should have been periodically updated to assimilate suggestions somehow, so that it does cover common use cases and questions but also remains correct and useful enough by curation and possible corrections.

That's not even the worst of its sins. The official part of the page is often incomplete, doesn't tell about important edge cases or differences between win and *nix. Also it is regularly flat out wrong.

Sometimes the comments are all screaming about how bad the doc is, then all give an inconsistent variant of the truth.

PHP has the best docs available.

When started using Python, oh man, I immediately noticed how much time I wasted because of the horribly structured all over the place docs.

Google also has some of the worst documentation, like on browser extensions.

When I was learning php as a teenager in early 2000' those community examples where the best.

I haven't touched php in forever, but I imagine that the spammers and idiots would ruin that feature.

These append-only community-driven docs were, like PHP itself, an amazing feature in 2001.

The massive amount of garbage and the downvoting wasn't a thing then.

They came when the Internet got populated by normies.

StackOverflow stopped being a fun place to be, too.

I believe that the documentation is a huge reason why php became so dominant on the net. Human curated, many real-work examples and helpful comments to get things done.

It's all I needed to learn web dev.

I completely forgot StackOverflow was even a thing. Haven’t used it since ChatGPT 3.5 was released

It was declining years before LLMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com