Hacker News Reader

Comment by aaronharnly | Hacker News Reader

I believe that 1 == true as much as the next nerd, but still, this line:

  declare(strict_types=1)

is that not a bit ironic?

View on HN

I think so, too. I know, I am just hating, but to me it seems like they just can not quite change their culture. Even if they implement something clean and elegant like strong typing their hacky past finds a way to slip in.

Nevertheless, congrats to them, they actually deliver.

> I know, I am just hating...

People has recently become quite reluctant to 'hate' on php, as if it is some kind of deformed being who needs emotional support. It is like criticizing Christopher Nolan.

You just don't 'hate' on it with out sliding in a few praises. I know that criticizing the language will result in heated (often irritating) debate with the php fan boys (I call them fan boys because other php users will not come justify the language, with things like, "every language has faults so it is ok"). But I think we can use a little less sugar coating. I am not telling that the language should be killed right off, but please just don't romanticize it's faults and send people who are serious about programming down a path they have to (hopefully) come back 9 or 10 years later (When they are finally disillusioned).

EDIT: he..he..downvotes!

Upvote.It's getting over complicated each update and not for simple development.While language like c# get more easier like old days php.

Yes, and as the person who came up with that, I was well aware of the irony. It was originally this:

  declare(strict_typehints=TRUE);

However, I changed it to the form that you see there because it was shorter. I felt that in the grand scheme of things it's not very important: declare() isn't a function, it's a language construct, and saving 5 chars from something that'll be typed very frequently is probably worth it.

> saving 5 chars from something that'll be typed very frequently is probably worth it.

This mindset is something that I've personally seen uniquely permeate every layer of the PHP community, more than anywhere else. I'm honestly curious, what makes communities seem to value things like typing less characters over clarity and correctness? The most important thing to me is reducing the amount of mental state needed for a human to read any line of code.

Because PHP is for really fast development, and not for slow movers who actually think a lot. That's what I sense after joining a company using PHP.

The language itself feels like a bag of features copied over from top contenders from the TIOBE index. You can see the fastness in the core of the language design.

After all, you use PHP to perform MySQL queries in the middle of HTML tags. If you want to do this, you know some principles are merely burden for your smooth execution of the web site development, and should be throw out the window at first thought.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should

The sort of approach you're describing is not suggested or used by anyone with half a clue what they're doing.

Indeed, no one with half a clue what they're doing uses PHP.

We program so hard we don't have time to think. Or type. At least not with as many characters as a sane person would.

In this case I don't think it sacrifices much clarity, and it avoids the word "typehint" which is controversial (correctness is disputed). Using TRUE wouldn't necessarily be more correct, it's fairly arbitrary.

I sort of wish you had done:

  declare(types=strict);

instead. That way other options can be added in the future.

i quite like this concept too, but both are still better than Hack's

    <?hh // strict

Strict what?

Hack's is a comment, not a proper pragma, too.

Yeah that's kinda sucky too. I assume it's because they also support their "strict" mode with regular php files?

Not syntactically legal, unless it's special-cased or we unusually make a lowercase constant for that purpose. declare() takes a constant value.

Well, it could've been this:

    declare(types="strict");

Alas, we are beyond feature-freeze now. Also, I quit PHP development.

I believe there was some discussion of using the same strict declaration as javascript ('use "strict";'), but there's already an "easter egg" in PHP that causes your program to exit and prints out something like "I think you're using the wrong language."

For some reason, this Easter egg was deemed too important to displace with an actual language construct.

Well, there's also the fact that something that changes the language behaviour really should be a pragma and not a magic import statement.

As someone who will be typing it very frequently, I wish the more verbose and obvious version had won out.

Well, there are non-ironic alternatives:

    declare(strict_typehints=TRUE); // not ironic, not short
    declare(strict_types=1); // ironic, short
    declare(strict=true); // not ironic, even shorter

JS has one strict mode, this could've been an opportunity to introduce an umbrella mode for strict coding in general.

Also the declare syntax could've been augmented to support passing implicit boolean parameters without setting a value:

    declare(strict); // oh yeah.

So... you know. Not that it matters what you call it, but choosing ugly (and ironic) over pretty (and sane) shouldn't be taken so lightly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com