WTF Is T_paamayim_nekudotayim (2013)

https://phil.tech/2013/wtf-is-t-paamayim-nekudotayim/

by nsoonhui • 4 years ago

86 68 4 years ago

phil.tech

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

Mirror because page doesn’t display properly for me.

https://archive.ph/ACL9Q

borbulon• 4 years ago

Thanks, looks like we have it the HOD.

NotYourLawyer2• 4 years ago

Different problem earlier. The text would come up for just a split second and then disappear.

readthenotes1• 4 years ago

What color is the error message?

userbinator• 4 years ago

I don't even use PHP regularly anymore, and never did encounter that message even when I did --- probably because my use of PHP predated all the OOP stuff --- but I still remember that word after reading articles about this precisely because it's so memorable. It's sad to see that they removed it in an attempt to effectively dumb down the language even more to cater to those not willing to use their brains and learn a bit about its (IMHO interesting) history. The other example of memorable words that I associate with a programming language are car and cdr.

pixl97• 4 years ago

I remember running into this error back in the day and wondering why it was named in such a manner I had to search it up rather than getting an explanation on what actually went wrong. These people wanted to make things hard for no good reason.

umanwizard3• 4 years ago

Interestingly enough clojure (probably the most widely-used lisp in the real world) uses “first” and “rest”.

Ma8ee• 4 years ago

And in the theme of the post, I kind of miss those old terms that I remember fondly from learning Scheme a long time ago. Using them felt like incarnating some ancient magic.

That said, the terms "first" and "rest" are superior, and one of the things I love about Clojure is that it never makes anything obscure.

nivertech2• 4 years ago

I don't get it. What was wrong with the following abbreviations: "Contents of the Address Register" (CAR), "Contents of the Decrement Register" (CDR)? IMO they're self-describing.

It also allow you to use all the premutations of Address and Decrement registers: C[A|D]+R. How do you do this with "first" and "rest"? ;)

lispm2• 4 years ago

Lisp uses these names decades before Clojure, see for example the Lisp Machine Manual from 1979 which documents first, second, ..., seventh, rest1, rest2, ...

notamy• 4 years ago

It's sad to see that they removed it in an attempt to effectively dumb down the language even more to cater to those not willing to use their brains and learn a bit about its (IMHO interesting) history.

As an alternative explanation, perhaps people don't want to be using Google to look up an obscure error message when they're in the middle of writing code, when the error message could be better and the history of the programming language is irrelevant to the problem at hand?

crdrost• 4 years ago

They often don't even know that's an option.

Here's the deal. Haskell has “Functor” (mappable), “Monoid” (aggregate/summary), “Foldable” (summarizable), “Monad” (context/commandlike). This language comes from a lot of early adopters being math nerds of a sort. It is a barrier to entry, and everyone understands that.

PHP’s situation is worse because, you know what's true about PHP developers? They are often just learning programming. It is an entry-level language, something you can throw into the HTML you already have to make some magic happen. Yes it can be so much more, but it ALSO is a lot of peoples' first look at programming. When you chose to learn Haskell you knew you were jumping in the deep end. The sitch with PHP is grown adults nearly drowning in a kiddie pool.

Look, when Haskell condescends to me, “Your rigid skolem type variables are bound by the type signature for fizzBuzz!” I know as a seasoned programmer that I am experiencing my own masochism and that I should probably Google away and that I may end up having to read a PDF by Dr. Craig T. Skolem to find out why he has a species of type variables named after him. But if you are just starting out? It just makes you feel like you will never be able to do this and why did you even try.

So keep T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM in the error message, feel free, I don't care. But IF it is there, please include in your English error messages in some brackets, “(that’s Hebrew for ‘double colon’, it helps for searching errors online)” or something like that. If you find that line in the error message smug/condescending, then T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM is all the more smug, because it has the same implications but hidden behind an extra smug superiority, “you don't know the history of this language, do you?!” Or, on the flip side, as long as the error message explains what went wrong and hints how to fix it, feel free to inject a mini Hebrew lesson into my day, sure.

TheRealPomax• 4 years ago

If you want to learn the history, go read "the history of PHP". There's tons opf it, none of it relevant to people who want to program modern PHP.

If you want to actually use PHP, or any other language, and the interpreter/compiler throws up errors that _cannot be understood_ by "using your brain" then that is both a bad design decision that should have been changed way back when, _and_ is a current bug in your interpreter/compiler that you need to fix.

kragen5• 4 years ago

ever since learning this i call :: the paamayim nekudotayim, for example in c++ or rust

unfortunately because i speak almost no hebrew i have to look it up every time

RobotToaster• 4 years ago

Just hope you never have to pronounce it.

kragen5• 4 years ago

why

i think hebrew is fairly phonologically simple, isn't it

on glancing at the overview, the only thing that looks remotely challenging is that [χ] (כ or ח) contrasts with [ʁ] (ר)

even the vowel system is roughly the same five-vowel system used by languages like spanish (and nearly japanese), and both consonantal gemination and phonemic vowel length have been dropped in modern hebrew

we're not talking about something like keresan here

so what are you on about

TazeTSchnitzel2• 4 years ago

I still think the debate over renaming that token had the wrong premise. It's not like “Expected T_STRING” is helpful either (yes that's real, no it's not a string literal). Token names are never user-friendly and shouldn't be user-facing, they should be an implementation detail.

beberlei2• 4 years ago

Tokens are left out of parse errors since PHP 8 released 2 years ago

See https://3v4l.org/2T8qQ

krick• 4 years ago

Weird, I didn't see that trash for so long I thought it was fixed at least in 7.0.

reedf1• 4 years ago

Maybe not a huge issue in itself, but points to a culture that is simply broken.

A confluence of issues like this lead to a highly idiosyncratic ecosystem - and hence to the negative view of PHP that many have.

beberlei2• 4 years ago

This discussion was 13 years ago, the project changed alot since then including its approach to self organization.

Tying back to this particular story, parse errors don’t include tokens anymore since PHP 8

2143• 4 years ago

Why should this be changed? Is it broken? Is it something that 1 second on google can’t answer?

Pretty sure every year there's thousands of unnecessary search requests for this nonsense.

Programming languages are tools. Make it as easy and straightforward as possible so that its users can build whatever it is they were building with the least amount of friction.

There are two reasons this term will stay. It is a tip of the hat to the amount of PHP work that came out of Israel

Funny because PHP — particularly theearlier versions — isn't exactly considered an example of good language design (though it has vastly improved recently).

but you google it once in your life and then you ‘forget’ about it.

Negative. I had forgotten what it meant. All I remembered was that I've seen it years ago and was annoyed back then.

And if you can’t remember the meaning of something like that, I hardly doubt you’d be a decent programmer anyway.

That's just, wrong on so many levels. Anyway, I'm just happy they didn't say anything like "people who screw up colons shouldn't be coding"

akiselev• 4 years ago

"people who screw up colons shouldn't be coding"

If you can’t get something as simple as a colonoscopy right, you shouldn’t be anywhere near a terminal.

porker• 4 years ago

And if you can’t remember the meaning of something like that, I hardly doubt you’d be a decent programmer anyway.

Ah, the elitest assholery that made PHP a wonderful place to be /s

skrebbel• 4 years ago

If seen PHP called a lot of things but “elitist” is new to me.

cookie_monsta• 4 years ago

I hardly doubt you’d be a decent programmer anyway.

I would like for somebody to hardly doubt that I was a decent programmer. Unfortunately most people belong to the "highly" faction

serial_dev• 4 years ago

To me, it feels like adding a booby trap in one of emergency rooms in the hospital.

When nurses complain about the injuries and the inconvenience, you berate them because "if they can't remember that in room 4 there is a booby trap, are they really intelligent enough to be nurses?"

jiggawatts• 4 years ago

This exact argument was made about pilots. If they can't figure out <counter-intuitive nonsense design>, then they shouldn't be pilots!

For a recent example, the MCAS design is nonsense, yet people were blaming the pilots, stating something along the lines of: "On page 837 paragraph 7, there's half a sentence that explains how to resolve the issue."

Forgetting to mention that the cause of the issue was purposefully omitted, and that the issue of unexpected trim change typically has a familiar and resolvable cause, not one that physically overpowers pilots... repeatedly. With delays. With no warning signal.

Even other pilots were blaming the dead pilots for making mistakes that were not humanly possible to avoid or recover from.

KronisLV• 4 years ago

That's just, wrong on so many levels. Anyway, I'm just happy they didn't say anything like "people who screw up colons shouldn't be coding"

A lot of those arguments read like they have a lack of empathy and desire to make things easier for new programmers who want to learn or use the language. To me, it comes across as if coming from a position of arrogance, especially the latter claim - a perspective that I've sadly have encountered often, with many people unapologetically being happy about their solutions or the status quo being being unapproachable or needlessly complex - be in regards to system design, code structure, or even how entire libraries (or languages) work.

Then again, even people like Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds have been known to be difficult in certain regards. I'm not sure whether our industry seems to attract people who have strong feelings about certain things, or whether those beliefs are simply more apparent. Either way, you'll have to deal with that, either because of technologies that you need to use and don't have control over, or because of having to work on certain projects together with developers like that.

Best you can do is probably be as nice as you can towards others yourself.

Also, web archive link, in case the site is down (rate limited) for anyone else: https://web.archive.org/web/20221204044109/https://phil.tech...

n3storm• 4 years ago

This remind me a discussion about making Wordpress natively compatible with Sqlite. Somebody put on the the table that Sqlite is using the rule of St. Benedict (adapted I would say) as they code of conduct and that should be a no-go for such development.

dang• 4 years ago

If it aint broke don't fix it. A PHP (horror) story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9485570 - May 2015 (7 comments)

PHP expects T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8196690 - Aug 2014 (1 comment)

T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM vs. Sanity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6356501 - Sept 2013 (2 comments)

josh_fyi• 4 years ago

As a Hebrew speaker, I have to say that even though one should stick to English in code, paamayim nekudotayim was probably used because it rhymes; it has rhythm; it sounds like nothing you would say in ordinary circumstances.

usrbinbash3• 4 years ago

There are a lot of words in French or Japanese that rhyme with keywords or English variable names in the projects I am working on. But I don't think my PO would be very happy if someone called him at 3 'o clock asking what the hell that line in the logs means.

mannerheim• 4 years ago

It isn't even spelled correctly. The romanisation should be nekudatayim: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%93%D7%A...

pwdisswordfish9• 4 years ago

By whose authority?

Jiro2• 4 years ago

The world's.

There are not an unlimited number of acceptable methods for romanizing Hebrew.

latte• 4 years ago

By who's authority should the word "who's" be spelled "whose" and not "who's"?

In all seriousness, it's interesting to see how the live language is diverging from the rules. The dual ending "-ayim" is supposed to be used with the singular stem: nekuda(-t) - giving nekudatayim "two dots", and likewise shnatayim "two years", dakatayim "two minutes", etc. But in practice, speakers classify dual as plural and use the form with both plural and dual endings: nekudotayim, dakotayim

buro9• 4 years ago

Please check back later Error 1027

This website has been temporarily rate limited

You cannot access this site because the owner has reached their plan limits. Check back later once traffic has gone down.

If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.

Gordonjcp2• 4 years ago

Unix culture is full of jokes.

Why is "T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" any less valid than "Printer is on fire"?

usrbinbash3• 4 years ago

Because Unix jokes don't make something that should be easy needlessly hard. If a double-colon is missing, then the error message should state that, in the language that 99.9% of the language is written in.

Gordonjcp2• 4 years ago

How exactly is it needlessly hard? You're going to google what the error message says anyway. Maybe if it's something silly, it'll stick better.

dale_glass• 4 years ago

As far as I know, the "on fire" joke originated in purely professional environments of the 50s or so, and got added to Linux in the early days when nobody but the most hardcore nerds used it.

An obscure in-joke makes sense when the system is used by the dozen people that will get it.

It quickly starts being annoying when you go mainstream.

Jiro2• 4 years ago

I'm reminded of the arguments why GNU will never call GIMP by a friendlier name.

amcsi• 4 years ago

I remember getting that error in the past, and at the time googling for that token gave few results, so it was a slightly bigger deal than you would think.

99% of the time the cause was: you are on PHP 5.2, but we're trying to use PHP 5.3 late static binding ( `static::someMethod()` ).

jrockway• 4 years ago

Like 20 years ago I sent the PHP folks a patch to make yacc generate errors in verbose mode or something, which causes the error message explain exactly what you need to do to fix this. It didn't get applied.

(Someone should also look at my PR for golang.org/x/net/trace from like 5 years ago.)

gpvos• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/ACL9Q

ericpp• 4 years ago

PHP 8 does exactly what he suggested and omits the token name:

  Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "::"

https://3v4l.org/2T8qQ

WTF Is T_paamayim_nekudotayim (2013)

Related Stories