How the first PHP functions were named

I like the story of PHP because it is a very powerful reminder that ultimately what matters is that something works, not that it is beautifully designed or appeals to some other higher-order train of thought. It's a very grassroots-style of innovation where pragmatism prevails, and there is no "right" way that people dogmatically follow. You don't have to know much about data structures or hashing to do anything useful, just find a way that works. You don't have to worry about finding the "perfect design". If people can learn a language like English with far more irregularity, inconsistent function names are the least of their worries. Just do it. And I find that very inspirational and motivating because it says that anyone who puts enough effort into getting something done, will.

neals3• 13 years ago

Ah, the great PHP massiah. This indeed looks like some very productive use of your time and effort.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

Perhaps you never learned that you are on the wrong side of the "Worse is Better" divide...

jtreminio• 13 years ago

yes but simply put, no one gives a shit what you want, other than the ones that already share your feelings.

You're not going to convince good php developers to stop using php, but you will convince the bad ones... actually go on with your bad self, ruby/python needs more bad devs

damon_c• 13 years ago

I have been a longtime PHP avoider myself, but I just recently installed Wordpress for the first time and I admit to being impressed by a few things.

One is the fact that because of the implementation of PHP, where I assume a totally new process is created for every web request, a PHP app can actually edit itself and emerge different for the next incoming request.

Because of this, Wordpress has amazing features where non technical users can install plugins and even edit the source code of Wordpress, in Wordpress... This would not be as easily done in any of the various reputable languages I'm aware of... at least not in the standard implementations of those languages.

Kiro• 13 years ago

I love PHP.

userbinator4• 13 years ago

Interesting trivia I've wondered about (like "why are the registers in x86 named in A, C, D, B order), not really any issue though; you memorise them just as well in any case if you work with enough code.

phaemon2• 13 years ago

why are the registers in x86 named in A, C, D, B order

Umm...they're not. Who names them in that order?

userbinator4• 13 years ago

Intel does. http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/x86oddities#register_o...

choult5• 13 years ago

Rasmus created PHP for his own benefit to begin - how was he to know back in 1994 that it would grow to power so much of the web? We all make mistakes; we all learn from them. Lets move on.

Of course, noone in this day and age would make any dodgy design decisions... would they?

http://www.chmod777self.com/2013/08/sigh.html

goldenkey2• 13 years ago

There's nothing wrong with the code that Node uses for HTTP verbs. It's optimized to do a single byte comparison where it needs to, the code is taken straight from nginx which is brutally optimized. You want speed, you got it.

choult5• 13 years ago

While it's true that the code in question was taken straight from nginx, if you bothered to read the NodeJS implementation (pre-fix, and referenced in my link) you would see that a secondary check against the full verb (that nginx performs further down the line) was not included.

Hence you could GEM a page or PUN an object. I'm not sure I want a codebase that's "brutally optimized" to the extent that it's not functionally equivalent.

EDIT: Used "functionally equivalent" as a more proper phrase than "idempotent" after the below feedback

growse• 13 years ago

The problem isn't making mistakes. The problem is not correcting them when you've learned they are a mistake and have had ample opportunity to do so.

fzltrp• 13 years ago

The opportunity is still there. This kind of mistake is easily fixed: create your own aliases for the functions you'd like to rename, and it's done.

If the PHP people are unhappy with them, they could do exactly the same, deprecate and remove the original names through a couple of major releases, and the problem is solved as well. Same solutuon for parameter order (needle, haystack, whatever).

Really I don't understand all the fuss around PHP functions names.

choult5• 13 years ago

Very true; I would be disappointed to discover that PHP is still using the same hashing function.

However, changing the function names (especially some of the core ones) is fraught with backwards-compatibility issues - PHP code written 15 years ago should, for the most part, still work, and not enough hosts out there run with the right error reporting to point out deprecation warnings, so you would probably end up with a lot of PHP sites with code silently failing when a host upgraded.

userbinator4• 13 years ago

They could've used a 32-bit comparison instead, which would remove much of the oddities (and probably run at the same speed on modern processors).

laumars4• 13 years ago

Nobody can blame the guy for the design choices and naming conventions he made back then. The problem is that they still exist 20 years later when much of the worlds web infrastructure runs on PHP.

I'd have expected (hoped) that by the time of the last major release (v5.0) the chief PHP devs would have used that opportunity to to rename some of the core functions. By that point PHP's popularity was already established and the shortcomings of it known. Plus as there was already a major Zend rewrite under way, to me it seems a sensible time to throw in a few in a few niceties to beautify / simplify the APIs.

Perl -PHP's spiritual predecessor- managed to tidy itself up circa v5.8 and now, ironically, Perl is cleaner language to code in despite the jokes about it being executable line noise.

choult5• 13 years ago

The past five or so years have seen engineers of greater experience take interest in PHP's ecosystems and core; a greater maturity in PHP is emerging. I suspect we'll see bigger changes coming over the next five or ten years, but it takes time to tame chaos.

todorstoyanov2• 13 years ago

According to this stats: http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming... PHP has 80% market share and growing. There must be some other advantages over this badly picked function names.

But if we talk about disadvantages, me personally do not like WordPress because of its slowness.

romanovcode• 13 years ago

There must be some other advantages over this badly picked function names.

Very easy to learn

berkes5• 13 years ago

I'd always argue against this. Python is, by far, easier to learn. Python was, after all, designed as a language to teach programming.

The issue is, that people often compare apples and oranges here:

Good, SOLID, and well-architectured OOP PHP applications (YII, Zend) are far harder to learn then Django or Rails. It is unfair to compare the "hacking of a free WordPress theme" to "setting up and deploying a full MVC application in Rails". When you compare similar stacks, PHP is, nearly always, the harder-to-learn choice.

A simple, hacked-together sequential script serving a webpage is, by far, easier in both Python and Ruby then in PHP. If only for the fact that both Python and Ruby come with decent, built-in webservers. PHP has gotten this in the latest release only, but before, a fair comparison would be: a PHP app requires you to erect a full LAP-stack, whereas a python-script could be serving pages on the most barebone machine with Python installed.

Again, the very beginning of PHP might seem easier to learn, because in practice, a lot of the infra is there and a lot of groundwork is already done (LAMP-stacks come for almost free; Passenger or Fastcgi not so much, allthough they are there). And then, when going a bit further then "removing these two menu-items in a WP-theme", when moving into the area of proper designed, maintainable webstacks, PHP is a lot harder to learn. And when moving one step further, e.g. including stuff like asyncronous workers, long-running-threads, commandline-tools, and so forth, PHP is often even completely unable to cope, but in the very least, proves a really hard and cumbersome tool.

TheZenPsycho• 13 years ago

If I had to take a guess, with PHP there's never been an opinionated nerd yelling at you that you're not smart enough to do it.

Just web-hosts and instant gratification.

berkes5• 13 years ago

I find it hard to use this survey as actual statistics. I could not find any details on how they measure, how many sites and servers are measured and so on. As far as I know, someone emailed his 400 friends on Facebook and placed the results in an excel-sheet.

* Does it take volume into account? Github (Ruby, Java, Scala) alone serves more pages then your average 10K Wordpress-sites will. Yet Facebook (PHP) serves such a huge number that it might even dwarve all the "enterprice" C#, Java and Cobol sites of probably all governments in the entire EU.

* Does it take economic value in account? One gov. site, or one large application (say, google docs) alone costs a multitude of what a 100K mom&pop PHP-webshops have cost. I, personally (as in: this is not a statistic nor any proof of anything) see a lot more value going around in the Ruby on Rails webdevelopment-economy then in the PHP-economy; the latter seems to consist of mostly a few-hundred-bucks Drupal installs or WordPress themes, whereas the first is almost always custom built and startup-development growing far over the 1K.

* How do they adjust for "not recognised"? I mean: it is hard to hide the fact that you are running a Drupal site, even for something large as the Whitehouse.gov. Whereas your average custom-built Django-backend is probably not even accessible for crawlers and even if so, most probably not recognisable as being Python/Django powered. In other words: off-the-shelve stacks are far more often recognised; and are, quite probably, nearly always PHP.

* How does this account for all the backend? Sure, WordPress is written in PHP, but many WP sites run off MySQL, which is just as important as the PHP-part; is WP not, PHP and MySQL powered then? Or other backends: the startup where I work now, has 90% of its code in the backend, Rails, with a tiny 200 lines PHP-app facing our users. This is certainly not a PHP-app, but would this survey count it as such?

warfangle2• 13 years ago

Facebook (PHP)

Facebook (PHP transpiled to C and compiled into a binary)

itafroma• 13 years ago

Note the original source of the screenshot was posted to Hacker News a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6919216

It has since spread like wildfire. This appears to be simple blogspam (tumblrspam?) of that.

alphadevx2• 13 years ago

1. Write a blog post about how horrible PHP is.

2. Instant up-voting on HN. Yay traffic!

3. Profit!

Full credit to the underpants gnomes: I couldn't have done it without you guys.

nir• 13 years ago

1. Write a blog post about how horrible PHP is.

For extra bonus, do it on Tumblr, a PHP-powered website.

alphadevx2• 13 years ago

Oh delicious irony ;-)

easy_rider• 13 years ago

And while PHP has been screaming to its community to "CHECK ALL INPUTS SDGY&F⁴8943%#$%#"

and then we have the Ruby guys coming along, butthumping Rails and mass assignment fests.

Name a perfect language/framework?

ErikAugust• 13 years ago

I find the inconsistency of the ordering of parameters in core PHP functions to be more frustrating than the names of them.

Either way, I guess I have to agree that people are spending a lot more time than necessary referencing php.net.

But then again, no need for all the anger and rage. There are a lot of things in the World much worse than PHP. There are things that are horribly wrong and yet still ubiquitous. Go fight racism, not web programming languages.

pete_b• 13 years ago

https://twitter.com/rasmus/status/413669330216185856

No such thing as bad publicity?

jimhart3000• 13 years ago

When I was visiting my brother for Christmas last year, my 14 year old nephew told me he was interested in coding and really wanted to learn Java and PHP. My reaction was "you clearly don't read Hacker News".

How the first PHP functions were named

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