Just for the sake of argument – any reason why not PHP?
I can think of lots of reasons.
* You're exposed to any upstream bugs in the language and interpreter
* Dynamic typing and silent errors mean you're far more likely to make a mistake and not realize it
* It's missing a lot of battle tested libraries and frameworks
* It's PHP
1. As in any language,
2. As in any interpreted language. Yes PHP has the gag operator (@) but it's use is discouraged (and not used in this example),
3. Not in my opinion. The Symfony framework alone has a ton of well used packages[0]. It does look like someone's decided to build their own framework from this example though,
4. Opinion.
Scheme, Standard ML, very early versions of Java, and BASIC come to mind.
Static typing really does seem particularly important in this domain, to the point that if an engineer is unable to find a suitable interpreted static language then the prudent choice would be to start looking at compiled langauges before relaxing the static typing requirement. Even implicit type conversion seems like a pretty questionable idea in this sphere. You really would want to be keenly aware of when you're doing something that might add or remove numerical precision.
[1]: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
How would you mitigate that, and how is the mitigation process any different for PHP?
Did you mean statically typed? There are two dichotomies: static vs. dynamic, and weak vs. strong. Ruby and Python have strong dynamic typing. PHP has weak(-ish) dynamic typing.
And (don't crucify me HN) I think dynamic typing rapidly loses its allure as your codebase grows large and "enterprise." The advantages in rapid prototyping and easy changes start to be overshadowed by the increasing burden added by unexpected side effects any time you change something. In Java, if I change an interface then I can find every client of that interface with one click and make sure each one is not broken by the change. The same is not true of JavaScript code; changing the valid inputs of a function can break things scattered around the code, and you won't notice unless you use a particular feature 3 times in a row on a waning gibbous moon.
For the purpose of short selling: who are they?
Using them for what though? I doubt they use them for their transcation money handling code.
public static function _Route_getStats($path) {
switch($path) {
case 'version':
...Want to get a web site up like right now, get some PHP. Want to run the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, maybe not so much.
Its syntax is bad and inconsistent, before 5.4 you couldnt have a function return an array and call it and access array contents like this funcName()['blah']. What the.
PHP only has one data type for structures, array, which in various ways pretends to be every data type, stack, queue, tree, hashmap, list, fuck it all, lets just call it array everywhere!
Anyway, everything else is implicitly converted as well, strings, integers, fuck it all, lets ouput 0 or 1 who cares.
PHP is basically not a language, its a clusterfuck of copy-pasted code everywhere, I bet its runtime, Zend, is as a copypaste of various C-libraries cobbled together.
I feel sorry for all the PHP lovers, must be stubborn ones, just like VisualBasic people 10 years ago when it was dying. PHP-lovers have the same argument now as VisualBasic did 10-15 years ago.
EDIT: Where and when I would use PHP. Never. There is always a better alternative. This talk about how easy it is to host, blah blah, then you never had to compile php and set its config flags and include dumb oci8 modules, pear or pecl files or whatever, or see it fail and no logs anywhere but you have to have system-level access to some ini files. Ugh... I think people have just learned to live with that crap, and the more sane languages and web frameworks like Flask or Grails are much easier.
As for not being able to access a array directly from a function which returns the array. It's just syntactical sugar. Yes long over due syntactical sugar however.
Autoupdateing can be implemented in VisualBasic as well.
As much as Lisps parenthesis everywhere do.
- Collection classes like Vector (which is like an array in every other programming language ever) and Map (associative array or hashtable)
- Generics
- Lambda functions
- Asynchronous functions
- Type hinting for intrinsic types (int, string, bool)
Not much public documentation yet, but most bits are in the open source HHVM release, and there are a few blog posts on it (eg. http://www.sitepoint.com/hhvm-hack-part-1/)