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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

Ahh yes, take the most criticized aspect of Java -- the obscene verbosity -- and cram it into PHP. Sounds wonderful.

I'll take a long function name over an incomprehensible one any day.

Given that many of PHP's method names are that way due to mirroring C (and others due to the hash table hackery), I think you'd just be much happier in a different language.

The function names come mostly from C, so it's not really PHP's fault.

It _is_ their fault, for repeating the stupid mistakes that Kernighan, Ritchie, et al made when designing Unix and C.

Short names weren't really a mistake when K&R made them.

Yes, for some time (the dark ages I like to think) programmers had to sacrifice productivity to make things faster, or to make them fit in memory. The original C compiler had a 6 character limit on variable names, leading to abominations like `strstr()`.

Fortunately, by the Pentium era, which was when PHP was designed, those times were long gone.

"X made this design decision before us" is never a good justification for any design decision unless the decision is truly arbitrary (i.e., are arrays 0 or 1 indexed?) -- then it might be better to stick to what's more familiar. If it was a good design decision then, then there must have been some reason at the time that should be true now to give a good case for repeating a design decision.

I find the juxtaposition between PHP's short function names taken from C, and things like T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM to be rather funny.

recently(not quite) there was a talk in php internals about changing that.

read this:

http://philsturgeon.co.uk/blog/2013/09/t-paamayim-nekudotayi...

Well, so long as they don't fix the parsing of octal int literals that is okay. Loosing both of my favourite offhand complaints would be rather disappointing. ;)

Never seen that one, but I think it's cute.

Expanding abbreviations doesn't improve clarity.

E.g. XMLHttpRequest vs ExtensibleMarkupLanguageHypertextTransferProtocolRequest

and ftp_ssl_connect vs FileTransferProtocol_SecureSocketLayer_Connect

or if you want to get really ridiculous:

MysqlndUhConnection::sslSet becomes MyStructuredQueryLanguageNativeDriverUserHandlerConnection::SecureSocketLayerSet

You're misrepresenting his position pretty badly. XMLHttpRequest is a comprehensible name. "MysqlndUhConnection" much less so.

Not being very familiar with PHP, I don't have any pet examples of inconsistent names to offer corrections for that might correspond with what he's actually talking about.

yeah , some people think it's easy to understand what strstr does...

...like everyone who has learned C or its derivatives. It's just part of the vocabulary of the language. You could as well ask "what's a list comprehension" in Python, for example.

Set comprehension is a standard mathematical term (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-builder_notation). List comprehension is a fairly natural name given that.

While you're at it why don't you fix: (needle, haystack), (haystack, needle)? :P

With array functions, the needle is first. With string functions, the haystack is first.

https://gist.github.com/salathe/1672543

This still doesn't convince me it was ever a beneficial design.

I didn't claim it was beneficial, just consistent.

Are you sure it's that consistent? I just feel like there's some function hiding somewhere that breaks this rule.

Or even use a proper IDE to code other than gedit/notepad !!

The verbosity of Java has nothing to do with long function names.

The verbosity is not only comprised of long method names.

Ironically, the obscene verbosity it is also a common trait of "not very smart" people.)

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