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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

With the recent discussion on the origins of PHP function names, and about what, if anything, can be done to fix PHP without ruining it...I'm curious about what happens at Facebook. Besides HipHop, do they maintain a strict PHP style among their developers? Even if HipHop can handle all of PHPs variations, I imagine there's time saved by writing optimally-designed (for the human) code, too?

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Code style is enforced (but overridable) by the code review system - both automated tools that provide feedback ("lint") on the code (things like "Don't use funcx() - it sucks <link here> - rather use funcy()"), and human code review.

Yes, they have a static analyser for PHP, Hack, written in OCaml

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKWNjFagR9k

Internally at my company, we've found https://github.com/scrutinizer-ci/php-analyzer to be very effective (after we made some hacks to support 5.5) and we can put it in our sniff pipeline in CI (a tad too slow for a pre-commit hook).

For core language features like that, there really is no way to "fix" it. Just pick a better language.

Poor choice of function names are the easiest of problems to fix. Write an internal base framework that you use and strongly discourage the use of functions outside of it. Even if the new set of APIs are as simple as just forwarding the call to the standard PHP one with reversed arguments, using one example people complain about all the time. This isn't hard to do, doesn't require a lot of upfront work (add APIs as you go) on a new project, and won't give you too much (if any) of a performance hit. You don't need to burn the house down because you don't like how the furniture is arranged.

PHP has so many more problems than that, though. I don't think it's worth the effort. It'd be like replacing the rotting floorboards of a house that has mold spores in every corner and a caved-in roof.

wow, you really hate PHP. That that mold infested roof caved in house runs a great deal of the web.

In what universe? Maybe to maintain wordpress applications, but thats just one product. I don't know that codes in php anymore.

We are literally in a thread about one of the biggest names in tech and something they invent to help with their massive PHP codebase.

Yeah, but Facebook is just a collection of Wordpress plugins.

See: http://wordpress.org/plugins/facebook/

;)

The universe outside your echo chamber.

Haha wow the blindfolds are strong with this one.

I'm actually a tad worried about what will happen to all the people who coded primarily PHP for their whole life when that roof finally collapses. Seems like it might look a bit like what happened with Symbian / Nokia -- they also had a massive cognitive dissonance over the quality of the developer environment, and when the system finally broke, it broke quickly and in a nasty way.

Then again, it's not impossible to learn a new environment or career path... and I'm quite against the thought that any language could permanently ruin a coder.

Additionally, something being popular implying it's good is a blatant fallacy.

I'm curious how you came to the conclusion that something that occupies, by conservative counts, over 75% of the web as being "a blatant fallacy".

Symbian / Nokia went the way of the dodo because the end user fell in love with the ease of use of the iPhone.

In our case, the end users are people who use the internet, not the ones writing code.

Your argument is about as ridiculous as I can imagine, with no real data to back it up other than your frothing hatred of a language.

Calling each and every criticism of the language you like as "frothing hatred" (as I've seen PHP folks do quite a lot lately) reeks of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps you should get over it.

Also, the end users of a programming language are the programmers, not the users of the application. 99% of users could not care less what's under the hood just as long as it works.

It does. COBOL also runs a large number of major banking and government infrastructures. Should we be working on a revision to COBOL with prettier syntax?

I don't hate PHP, but I've written, looked at, and audited enough of it to come to dislike it.

Do you have any PHP code you've written that you can link to? I'm curious as to how versed in PHP you actually are.

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