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A Decade of PHP

Posted by Zonk on from the i'll-bring-the-cake dept.

digidave writes "It was slow to catch and a lot of people didn't get it. A lot of people still don't get it, but you can't argue with its success. June 8th, 2005 marks the tenth anniversary of PHP. Here's to ten more wonderful and exciting years."

3 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Congratulations are in order! by quinto2000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    there are several classes, including the PEAR DB class, that provide a DB abstraction layer.

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  2. Re:Congratulations are in order! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dude, you need to provide links. I had to *gasp* Google it! ;-)

    For others, PEAR can be found here:

    PEAR Class Repository

    The Database classes of PEAR appear to be documented here:

    Database Package

    Looking over the DB classes, it looks like they provide a fairly decent abstraction. Thanks Quinto, that will definitely be nice for future PHP projects. :-)

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  3. PHP definitely does not follow the KISS principle by Peter+Cooper · · Score: 5, Informative

    PHP has long followed the KISS principle

    Are you smoking crack? PHP is more inconsistent than any other language I've encountered. I'm not disrespecting the team, as I'm sure they've worked hard, and it's great to celebrate ten years of an admittedly very useful language, but PHP is not an inherently easy language.. it's just one that lets you code sloppily and get away with it.

    For a start, PHP functions seem to have no consistency at all. Sometimes you get verb/object, sometimes object/verb. Sometimes you get underscores, sometimes you don't. Consider.. is_object but isset. str_rot13 but strpos. php_uname but phpversion. There are hundreds of these. It's the reason I could never learn PHP, it's like learning Chinese, but I found Perl (and now Ruby) easy due to their relative consistency. Sometimes PHP uses "to", sometimes it uses "2".. huh what's that about?

    Unlike Perl which has a few regular expression constructions and a handful of modifiers.. PHP has a whole glut of regular expression functions which have confusing names, some of which take certain modifiers, and some that don't. As someone who has mastered Perl's regular expressions I find it a major struggle when I have to tackle something in PHP (I admit, I've never 'learned' PHP, but I find it a very hard language to make quick fixes on for other people.. compared to, say, C, VB or Python, languages I don't know intimately but can easily hack).

    PHP has thousands of core functions.. nuts! And why does PHP have such a bizarre lack of abstraction? PHP often has about 10 functions compared to other languages' single function.. with each of the 10 doing a slightly different thing. When it comes to being overly wordy and inconsistent, I doubt anything can beat PHP, but, well, I'd like to see someone bring up a language that is!

    So if you were going to call any language "KISS", it'd be Ruby or Python.. but PHP? No way.