If it aint broke don't fix it. A PHP (horror) story

philsturgeon.uk

17 points·cbaleanu··7 comments

> Why should this be changed? Is it broken? Is it something that 1 second on google can’t answer? If somebody is advanced enough to be using classes (I think about the only time you would use a double colon) then they should know what it means.

If you know PHP classes, then you know Hebrew.

What's the #1 Google result for T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM? It didn't bother me the first time I saw it. What's the problem?

I think the point was that any parser should always produce clear messages. What it should not do is to print some nerdy text and require the user to have an internet connection and Google just to understand what the compiler was expecting.

> any parser should always produce clear messages.

Or any program.

When wearing my sysadmin hat, about 75% of my time is spent chasing down the causes of vague or unhelpful error messages, and 25% is spent actually improving the server environment.

> What's the #1 Google result for T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM?

This blog post is.

> What's the problem?

Some of us encountered it back before Google returned helpful results about it.

Referring users to a third party to understand your error messages is an asshole thing to do. It's just another flavor of the typical "you're doing it wrong" shit we always get from PHP.

My thoughts exactly. First time I saw that lame error message I thought it was an April Fools joke.

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