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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

That can't possibly be true. I refuse to believe it.

Oh It makes complete and total sense. PHP was not a "language" originally. It was a collection of handy functions in Rasmus' toolbox. When it "graduated" to language, and I use that term loosely no one bothered to clean it up. No one bothered to clean it up is PHP's mantra and it explains everything that people hate about the language perfectly.

Even with the "PHP is a personal hack", it doesn't make sense. More effort goes into naming functions than writing a one-line xor "hash".

I'm more inclined to believe Rasmus is trolling here. Sure, he used strlen, but it's too hard to believe functions were named with this in mind.

I think the point is that it is simple to add symbols in the C source code. You simply count the number of characters and then add it in the appropriate place.

Or perhaps 'standards last forever'. By the time someone thought to say 'Oh, we should probably fix this mess we created', it's already being used in to many programs to change it out for something else.

you can still deprecate in Vx and remove in Vy.

I mean, I may understand keeping the strange array-is-a-hash thingy, but changing function names is easy.

Heck, even without removal, PHP being "the language of sensibly named functions with a bunch of legacy aliases that you can ignore" would still be a million times better than being "the language where every single stdlib function has its own unique form of retardation"

( used in the dictionary sense, not in the able-ist sense)

Taken from PHP 1.99 source [1]: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/e8k4n2mx1y5vsa4/Zrzut%20...

So yeah, it's true :).

[1] http://museum.php.net/php2/php-1.99s.tar.gz

So what I don't get is why the function names needed to be of a certain length, since he's hard-coding the buckets.

Well, good thing that PHP is open source and we can just pop a visit to http://museum.php.net/php2/ to actually see that it is true.

Either way, it's hillarious :-)

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