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Enjoy Fractal, Hardly, and a synthesis of the two by analogy to Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts

The last time I compared Eevee's "fractal" article to ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, I found that PHP's alleged problems fit into two categories: those that can be easily worked around with coding standards, and about a half dozen real issues.

PHP 7 has completely addressed one of the real issues, namely parse errors in include being fatal, by introducing engine exceptions. Function argument and return value type hints add some of the benefits of Python-style strong typing to PHP. And though associativity on ?: is still on the less useful side for reasons of backward compatibility, the new null coalesce operator ?? is on the proper side for chaining.

True, not all points in that essay are valid

The guy who wrote that is an idiot, and you're an idiot for listening to him.

I find php to be one of the nicer to use languages

When did PHP stop being "a fractal of bad design", as a well-known essay claims? True, not all points in that essay are valid, but I myself see six categories of valid criticism of PHP.

Many of us have read the PHP is a fractal of bad design article and a commonly cited rebuttal. I tried to reconcile the two and ended up with about a half dozen legit complaints.

Let's play Hegelian dialectic: Thesis The "fractal" rant Antithesis The "hardly" rebuttal Synthesis Six identifiable bullet points

Anyone cosidering PHP should read this the now infamouns "PHP is a fractal of bad design".

Which must be balanced with the "hardly" rebuttal. For example, PHP lets a program solve the exception/warning dichotomy cleanly in about six lines of code; see the manual's page about the ErrorException class. This leaves about a half dozen legitimate complaints:

• No way to turn off the language's loosely-typed comparisons.
• Parse errors and undefined function errors are fatal rather than throwing an exception that the caller can catch.
• Inconsistent naming conventions in the standard library.
• Associativity for the ternary ?: operator is the less useful side.
• PHP allows the server operator to change program semantics in ways that are annoying to work around, such as not allowing a shared hosting subscriber to turn off "magic quotes" or not following HTTP redirects in libcurl.
• PHP versions change the semantics of existing programs in ways that encourage shared hosting providers to continue to offer only outdated versions of PHP, making it impossible for web application developers to take advantage of new features.

The problem with everything you say, every comment you make on PHP and Javascript is that it goes along the lines of:

"Still waiting for at least a half-decent argument that it "sucks". (I've seen the fractal article, and then I fact-checked it. Guess what I think about it now?)"

Please elaborate. Tell us what you found not to be true in that article, tell us what your fact checking discovered. Don't just say "I fact-checked it" and then that obviously means it wrong. Guess what you think about it now? I've no idea given that you've never ever managed to counter it at all, are you perhaps thinking "Fuck it's right, but I can't rebut it, so I'll just pretend it's wrong"? Did I guess right?

"More than 80% of websites seem to agree."

Where is the evidence? Even if true what proportion of major players use PHP? Very few serious players who have to maximise stability, performance and security do - Twitter? Nope, Google? Nope, eBay? Nope, Amazon? Nope, Slashdot? Nope, BBC? Nope, Microsoft's sites? Nope, Apple? Nope, YouTube? Nope, Blogger? Nope, LinkeIn? Nope. Facebook goes near it but even they've been translating it to C++, or trying to convert it into Java with a JIT for the last 5 years. Other than that there's what, Wikipedia and Yahoo? Fact is in major sites even Python has more of a showing than PHP. Even if PHP is used in more sites, it's used in less serious sites that actually matter so sure PHP may be prolific in first time or throw away sites, but if you're doing anything as a business, if you're doing anything where you want security, stability, and performance, then PHP is not a viable option. You don't find PHP in banking or most of the major eCommerce sites for example, it's Java for the most part.

Look, I'm not saying you're wrong about PHP, but you're infuriating to have this discussion with because no matter how hard I or anyone else tries you just never back up your claims. You just make comments like "There's nothing wrong with PHP", "The fractal article is nearly all wrong", but you can never prove it, you can never elaborate, you can never expand on it. I can't tell if you're a shill or a troll, I find it hard to believe you're anything else for the simple fact that you're so utterly evasive in justifying your arguments.

The "PHP is a fractal of bad design" article is a long well argued piece on PHP. If you want to have it declared wrong you similarly need to take at least some time to tear it apart. Simply saying something is wrong doesn't make it so, you have to explain why and how it is wrong.

Until you can start backing up your claims, one can only assume you're simply full of shit - a troll, a shill, a fanboy, whatever. You need to start justifying your claims - those criticising PHP have done so time and time again, and many just point to fractal precisely because it saves them having to repeat those already well established points. I've yet to see anything that can counter it, the best I attempt I saw was this forum rebuttal:

http://forums.devshed.com/php-...

The problem is, the author of it only manages to demonstrate how little he knows about software and programming, rather than demonstrating that article he's disputing is wrong in many, or even any ways. I would love to have my knowledge expanded by being informed as to the many ways in which fractal is wrong but all those of you that claim to have this knowledge seem unwilling to provide it, is there some curse on it? will the world end if you tell us why fractal is wrong or something?

Long story short, less fanboy, more facts please, and if you're not willing to start arguing your case with facts then stfu because I'm sick of seeing PHP articles flooded with unsubstantiated fanboy nonsense. You're like the annoying religious guy who argues that god exists just because he does and that's all there is to it, you can't justify the claim, you can't explain why, but you've decided in your head he's real without any justification so that's it he absolutely must be.

Rebuttal: http://forums.devshed.com/php-...

There's even a website dedicated to PHP WTFs

Consider that a language (rather than a programmer) causes a WTF moment when it behaves other than would intuitively be expected according to its own rules of grammar. On that basis alone, PHP wins hands down.

Not the best PHP WTF site. Try PHP Sadness or A Fractal of Bad Design or even CodingHorror. In the interests of balance: A Fractal of Bad Design: A Rebuttal

Linking to that over and over doesn't make any of it true.

No, the fact that it's an accurate description of reality makes it true.

http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal-of-bad-design-hardly-929746.html
http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/04/php-sucks-but-i-like-it.html

LMAO, die in a fucking fire, dumbshit.

Every point in that write up has been rebutted. Linking to that over and over doesn't make any of it true.
http://forums.devshed.com/php-development-5/php-is-a-fractal-of-bad-design-hardly-929746.html
http://blog.ircmaxell.com/2012/04/php-sucks-but-i-like-it.html

I'm uncomfortably reminded of DirectNIC in St. Louis with employees that voluntarily stayed behind to ensure availability for critical services during Hurricane Katrina.

I ran into the same problems and ended up switching to the "deadline" scheduler. Haven't had a single problem since. I changed it via the "elevator=deadline" on the kernel boot prompt, but you can change it on the fly for individual devices. See Configuring and Optimizing Your I/O Scheduler to see how.

Ximian, now Novell, did fork OO.o...

Microsoft's partner Novell forked the code because they are putting toxic elements that are unacceptable to the community at large. Novell is acting as Microshat's proxy to poison the code pool. They weren't allowed to shit in the core project so they made fork and are polluting that. I would say use at your own risk but by you using it, you make computing worse for the rest of us. So don't use anything from Novell.

Novell is putting one trojan horse after another into their fork on behalf of Microsoft. That's where the docx and vba turds are coming from. Even if only strategy rather than the technical and licensing inferiority are not enough to eschew Novell's fork, OpenDocument Format is the future as are scripting languages Javascript and Python. Upgrading to OpenOffice.org and carrying VBA baggage with just guarantees that the systems are out of date before they are deployed. That goes double for the file format, especially since the public sector around the world has been moving back to open formats and naming OpenDocument Format specifically along with HTML and PDF.

Quantity of work is not the same as quality, and goals and licensing are yet another pair of separate factors.

You can do it via the shell, if you boot with command+s, but root is switched off by default. You need to enable it in from the Directory Services app in the utilities folder (in 10.1 to 10.5), or in System/Library/Coreservices in 10.6.

false
I never enabled single user mode, I have recovered root on 10.3.
It helps to be right if you want to school me...

NAT is not a permanent solution

Nice try but pure fabrication. NAT, aka private address space, is not going away. Telcos/ILECs blocked NAT when IPv6 was being developed and have since then spent a lot on marketing IPv6 without NAT/rfc1918 as a solution too all our problems. In so doing they have delayed the adoption of IPv6 by many years. How much longer will their transparent opposition to IPv6 NAT delay the inevitable? That is the question. No, we are not going to assign public IP addresses to every network-enabled computer and other device. And no, we are not going to implement IPv6 until NAT is fully supported. This is the reality that those who claim, falsely, that NAT is not a solution, are trying to ignore.

Sadly, due to telco/ILEC influence there is not likely to be a single IPv6 NAT implement for several years. When it does happen, and it will, there is likely to have already been multiple IPv6 NAT implementations which network programmers will have a hard time reconciling. The problem is vendor lock-in, which astroturfing ILECs cannot achieve without blocking NAT, and in the process 'owning' all of your IP-enabled devices.

See also
  http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/072109-nat-housley-qna.html
  http://www.techworld.com/networking/features/index.cfm?featureid=4167
  http://archives.devshed.com/forums/networking-100/security-gain-from-nat-top-5t-2323463.html

A quick glance at devshed.com shows no C/C++ at all.

Hmmm...

Python compiles to bytecode, which is in turn executed line by line.

Actually, on any DB it's better to create the index after the fact if possible for a simple reason. The most common index is a B-tree, and creating it after the fact leaves you with a perfectly balanced tree. Creating it while loading data requires a lookup for every row, which takes much longer, and it also results in an unbalanced tree, so your queries will not be as efficient. In my initial attempt using MySQL, I actually did create the index ahead of time, but the time required to load the data was much too long. I researched this issue quite a bit, and found this article, which echoed the sentiments of many, indicating that it's much more efficient to create the index after the fact.

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/MySQL/MySQL-Optimizatio n-part-1/6/

This seemed like it would work but lead me to the previously described problem. I would also like to add that the company I work for does use MySQL in certain instances with tables over 100 million rows; however, these databases are maintained by a third-party company specializing in the application, and even they wrestle with corruption quite frequently. I've used MySQL quite a bit in the past, and I'm not saying it's impossible to use with large amounts of data. I'm saying it's a PAIN, and out of the box Postgres is much easier to work with and much easier to maintain. Anyway, this is just my experience, so take it FWIW. BTW, it's pretty obvious that you're trolling at this point, so I'm only responding for the benefit of those who might actually be interested in doing this for a living in the "real world".

Chase what you love, first and foremost. That said, you should surf Sourceforge and sign into one of the projects there. It will help "the cause" of forwarding FOSS.

If you want extra money, you'll find enough few contract programming jobs (if you're competent) at places like Hire A Programmer or Xperts 4 Hire. There are others but you know how to google, right programmer?

For example, my side projects include:
  - FOSS Sudoku
  - Postgres Build machine agent
  - General BSD OS fiddling
  - Local C++ work
  - various "skunkwork" projects at my local job (.NET)

The rest is non-tech. I must stress that having a non-tech side makes your life whole.

The Developer Shed Network[1] is a whole slew of sites and forums run by the same people (Jon Caputo and others). They have a lot of nice tutorials/articles, as well as various forums such as ASP Free[2], which is dedicated to Microsoft-ish technologies; and Dev Shed[3], which is geared more towards free and open-source technologies such as Apache, Linux/*BSD, XML, C/C++, MySQL/PostgreSQL/Firebird, PHP/Python/Perl/et al.

Trust me on this last one. I'm a moderator on many of the forums there and the people are always very helpful, polite, and (in most cases) respond to threads rather quickly.

[1] http://www.developershed.com/
[2] http://forums.aspfree.com/
[3] http://forums.devshed.com/

"I don't think MySQL has this feature. (Please correct me if I am wrong.)"

Just correcting my own FUD here. Evidently MySQL does have MVCC, via InnoDB.

See folks, you can't go wrong either way! :-)

Actually, it violates the 4th and 5th amendments to the US Constitution and some of it has already been thrown out by judges.

http://www.devshed.com/showblog/1305/PATRIOT-Act-D eclawed

JimmyGosling Then I think you are a little confused. I am going camping with this guy in a couple weeks and he is Absolutely not James Gosling. Maybe you mean someone else, but i doubt it. Anyway, good gor a laugh.

JimmyGosling Then I think you are a little confused. I am going camping with this guy in a couple weeks and he is Absolutely not James Gosling. Maybe you mean someone else, but i doubt it. Anyway, good gor a laugh.

If anyone is interested in conversing with James Gosling one-on-one, he (amazingly) hangs out at DevShed.com in the forums, likes to aswer questions, and my guess is he knows what he's talking about when it comes to Java. Even more amazing is that as smart a guy as he is, his social skills leave a lot to be desired (read some of his posts in the Lounge).

I, for one, am dedicated to PHP & MySQL but lately I"ve been experimenting with Coldfusion. Now I realize that Coldfusion is no open-source but in the past months, it has been a very good friend to me unlike PHP. CFM gave me the quick and easy commands to perform what I do on a daily basis or easy intergration ongoing projects.

In all, PHP & MySQL are by far the best there is, but i still have to explore other regions. Hence, I do not look forward anytime nor in the future to ASP.Net. I like to stay away from the proprietary enforcements and give my small snippets a chance when I need them on open-source applications!

This article is FUD, pure and simple.

Everything added in PHP 5 has no effect at all on the casual or professional PHP programmer. They can go about writing their code exactly as they did with PHP 4, and PHP 3. That's because the PHP Group (the folks that develop the PHP product, not Zend) work very diligently (to some peoples' dismay) on ensuring as much backwards compatibility as possible.

All of the (very useful) OOP technology added in PHP 5 will help to push PHP into the enterprise market and allow business to build large apps using PHP. It's certainly not everything the enterprise will need, but it's a start. NONE of these additions make it any more complex for a PHP 4 user. ALL of the additions help make it possible to create well-designed web applications, though.

I used to have some respect for devshed.com because they always had interesting articles. The articles were a useful resource and quite helpful. I just don't understand why they're posting whining rants like this which do not help anyone in any way. Let this guy post it on his blog and be ignored like he should be.

Sadly, this is not the first time Mr. Felton has written an article like this.

So its the same as the official kernel then!!

OSRM estimated last August that Linux may infringe on 283 patents.

Personally, I believe that if specific instances of actual infringement are known, those parts of the code should be rewritten. Unless the kernel writers are part of a civil disobedience campaign I'm not aware of?

Hire this guy. Awhile back there was a /. article that linked to one of his sites. It survived just fine.

Dude really knows his stuff...

Hire this guy. Awhile back there was a /. article that linked to one of his sites. It survived just fine.

Dude really knows his stuff...

The machines that we build are pretty much identical, but we don't ship with WiFi support as a standard feature. The machines I work on are generally in for repair or upgrade to WiFi capibility. The problem lies in third party software running and not offering all the options that Windows does, and vice versa. Some WiFi cards offer non-standard options that can only be configured with the bundled software, while some bundled software doesn't support all the features that Windows does. SP2 offers more such features and a whole new utility for setting up WiFi, while the existing bundled utilities don't support these. My advice is to KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid, and that if it works with your current config, let it be. Microsoft will eventually force all XP users to upgrade to SP2, by March 2005 I think, here's DevShed's article on the matter: DevShed so it's worth messing with it now, and getting advice while the topic is still hot. I try to uninstall the 3rd party software (checking first that I have the discs to re-install it), then install SP2, then install the 3rd party software again. If i can get the 3rd party software working, then I leave it, otherwise i remove the 3rd party stuff from the Startup folder, reboot, and try to config the WiFi through Windows. I have had a 100% success rate so far, but in several cases I've used a USB wireless thingie (technical term i know). The drivers for USB networking devices seem to be unaffected by Service Packs. Hope this helps. Short answers to your questions: 1 - Build machines have their hard drives imaged off a master drive with SP2 already on it, but i only work on machines that come in, which can be of any age, any spec, any config, any amount of crap done to them by incompetent users 2 - The firewall in SP2 seems to be quite well behaved. To be honest I usually switch it off, and let the inbuilt firewall in the ADSL routers that I ship to customers do the protecting. I wouldn't advise using another software firewall with SP2, until MS release a patch that lets you switch off the inbuilt completely.

All that said, I find it quite odd that you wouldn't use the tab feature extensively, considering this post of yours (the avatar suits you). But maybe you just play Everquest all the time.

OTOH, I had a look at your site, and all you have there is some IE specific JavaScript stuff, and you also mention that you use IE as your browser ... strange, huh?

Thanks for sparing me the slew of obscenities, BTW. Oops, no you didn't ... too bad. Well, maybe you can say some nice things about my mother in your reply?

I think Yahoo! would object to being described as a small site. Devshed network runs on a slightly customised version of the Mambo Open Source CMS (PHP/MySQL).

That tenet is still true. If this were not true there wouldn't be some 112 projects on sourceforge with "PHP" and "template".

I personally use PHPLib templates, something I've discussed quite publicly.

Mixing logic and presentation is a no-no for effective software design.

Sorry to reply to my own comment....

Although this book is probably good, I found a lot of good PHP Amazon Web Services code from: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Using-Amazon-Web-Se rvices-With-PHP-And-SOAP-part-1/.

I think they have other examples in languages other than PHP too.

Hello, Since webmonkey is going down, what are some others resources that you guys find equally well? I know of Arson Network. What about you guys?

Besides W3Schools which has been mentioned in this Slashdot discussion sometimes, I like Dev Shed - http://www.devshed.com/. It has lots of nice tutorials/articles about Perl, PHP, Java (including JSP), Python, XML, MySQL, Flash, etc...

There was also a very nice discussion in Slashdot, around two years ago, about online resources for Developers:

I understand the need to keep afloat, but this is over the top!

It's the Backdoor-CAY virus, as named by McAfee. See this article for a description by the person who originally found the virus.
Sending the file to McAfee really helped :)

A really good view/break-down/rant on this letter can be found here

It is a very well written and quite thorough analysis.

Zope is a very cool web application system, and while I don't know of Guido's specific contributions I have to assume that they were great. Still, I'm confidant that Zope will carry on.

For those not familiar with Zope, it is a web application server written entirely in Python. It features an object database that, for example, lets you create an image object, and then call it from other code to automatically build your image tag based on the dimensions and title of the image stored in the object.

It's open source, developed both by the Zope community and the Zope corporation. There are at least two kick ass, open source content management systems built on top of Zope Corp's content management framework that I know of: Plone and Silva. There are a ton of add-on products that are downloadable too.

Zope does have a pretty steep learning curve, if you don't do stuff with "real" web applications (stuff that needs access control lists, user management, templating, etc) it might not be right for you, but it's great for bigger applications. Edd Dumbill talks in a recent blog entry about why Zope is worth learning and DevShed (which runs on Zope) has a good overview.

Guido and Dan Farmer are both smart guys and I'm sure that we can expect good things.

Nope, PDFs are an open format. For more information on the subject check out this DevShed article.

One way to help structure your PHP application would be to use Fusebox, an open standard that encourages separation of logic from data (from a DB for example) and presentation (HTML).

I have used Fusebox with several Cold Fusion applications and have that it with FuseDoc are a great combination for creating a webapps in a standard fashion. It allows new developers who are familar with the Fusebox structure to pick up on your design quickly and implement their assigned pieces in a more reusable manner. Here is a good tutorial on Fusebox with PHP. This site is another great Fusebox with PHP resource.

A ColdFusion, Java, and PHP developer's weblog might also be helpful. (Disclaimer this is my weblog! :)

I've been using PHP quite heavily for a few years now; I never picked up a PHP book, not once.. Why? Simply because the community support, the IRC channel, the Online Documentation and even places like devshed simply have so much to offer! I have not even once printed or purchased even a mere shred of dead tree painted over with ink that describes or outlines PHP in any way whatsoever.

If you do a Google search for "MySQL vs. PostgreSQL, you'll get a lot of hits. Here are a few that seem to be pretty informative (if not slightly dated):

here
here
here
here
here
here (not really a comparison, but read this article and the linked Postgres article for more info)

In my personal experience, Postgres has historically been the database more prepared for larger, more multi-threaded applications.

Obviously, there have been debates about which are faster in various different applications. To be honest, I have no hard data, nor have I stretched them either to their capacity, but as a user and casual developer, they are both fast enough for me not to notice.

What's inarguable exciting can be directly quoted from MySQL's own comparison of the two (listed above):

[B]oth products are continually evolving. We at MySQL AB and the PostgreSQL developers are both working on making our respective databases as good as possible, so we are both a serious alternative to any commercial database.

• http://www.phpbuilder.com - PHP, some real world examples.
• http://www.devshed.com - PHP, Perl, Python and more.
• http://www.php.net - PHP
• http://www.perl.com - Perl
• http://www.coveryourasp.com - ASP, all real world examples.
• http://www.builder.com - C, C++, Java, Perl, Python and more.
• http://www.devcentral.com - C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl and more.
• http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html - C FAQ.

• Programming Perl - Perl
• The C Programming Language - C
• The C++ Programming Language - C++
• PHP and MySQL Web Development - PHP and MySQL. All real world examples.

Joel on Software
Many texts to read, some of them really insightful

Devshed
Many tutorials, focus on scripting languages

Article Central - a collection of articles related to web development from all over the web. Updated sometimes every day, some times only every other day but always updated. They cover everything from Java to PHP to Macromedia products. Really a must if you are a web developer.

Devshed - I think someone already posted this link, but it's a really good source of tutorials and real world applications.

Freshmeat - Whenever someone tells me that they need a certain functionality, I look here first to save me some time.

Index.html and Index.css at Blooberry.com - no doubt the BEST HTML and CSS references available on the web. Tells you what elements and tags are supported by every browser out there, what version of the browser supports them, and any strange behavior that the browsers might exhibit related to that tag or element.

IBM Alphaworks - Lots of cutting edge software.