To be fair: If you are chaining ternary expressions, you deserve to suffer whatever pain the language happens to inflict upon you tenfold.
Why?
It’s perfectly readable.
It is sort of readable. A switch is “perfectly” readable for switching.
Ternary expressions aren’t switches though
Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be using them in a situation that clearly calls for a switch.
The fault is the programmer for not using a switch statement.
“php doesn’t stop me from coding like a moron, therefore php sucks”
But if you code like a moron the code should still behave as expected. People who code like this deserve a special place in hell, next to languages that behave like that.
I say that php breaks math entirely, and is therefore bad. “” == null returns true null == [] returns true “” == [] returns false.
In more recent versions it gets worse, because it has 0 == “any text” return true, “any text” == true return true, and 1 == true return true So indirectly 1 = 0, and now math is more directly broken.
How about “php enables me to code like a moron”, or even better, "php breaks common conventions and forces me to think about every little detail and special edge case, slowing me down if I don’t want to accidentally ‘code like a moron’ "
Nested ternary operators emerge because of the lack of if/switch expressions (which is C fault), so they are “useful” (they shouldn’t be). However, PHP is the only language that treats it as left associative. This has 2 problems:
- You are forced to use parenthesis. Some (insane) people might do: (cond1) ? “A” : (cond2) ? “B” : “C” And it makes sense. Its ugly af, but it makes sense. But PHP now forces you to use more parethesis. It’s making you work more.
- It breaks convention. If you come from any other language and use ternary operators, you will get unexpected results. After hours of banging your head against the wall, you realize the problem. And now you have to learn a new edge case in the language, and what to do to actually use the language.
“But you shouldn’t use ternary operators anyway! Use if/switch/polymorphic dispatch/goto/anything else”
True, but still, the feature is there, and its bad. The fact that there are other alternatives doesn’t make the PHP ternary operator worse than other languages’ ternary operator.
PHP works against you. That’s the problem. The ternary operator is not a good example, since there are alternatives. But look at something so simple, so mundane like strpos.
If strpos doesn’t find returns
false. Every other language returns -1. And if you then use this value elsewhere, PHP will cast it to 0 for you. Boom, your program is broken, and you have to stare at the screen for hours, looking for the error.“BuT yOU sHoUlD AlwAyS cHEcK tHe rETurN eRRor!”
And even if that’s true, if we all must check the return value, does PHP force you to do so? Like checked exceptions in Java? Or all the
Option&Resultin Rust? throws, throws, throws… unwrap, unwrap, unwrap… (Many) people hate those featuresPHP works against you. And that’s why its bad.
Hating on php is one of the reasons i left reddit. This is just people who don’t use php hating php for some reason. You can do dumb examples like this for any language. Low effort and funny for children.
Your feelings are valid. I wonder though, would you put up this level of defense for posts making fun of arbitrary parts of non PHP languages?
You are not your favorite language. And I find most criticisms of most languages to be very valid. I don’t think the intent of OP is to insult all PHP programmers. It’s okay to like a language that has problems. All languages do.
I’d wager prevalence is part of their problem. Jokes get tired after a while, but that doesn’t always mean they stop.
PHP, like any language, has its problems, but it seems to get poked at a lot more often. But making the same joke over and over has been a problem long before reddit was a thing.
PHP gets a totally disproportionate share of hate and that is the problem. Children like to dunk on PHP and a group mentality pushes it even more.
Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. This is the first post I have seen pointing out a flaw in PHP on Reddit or Lemmy. If you ask me JavaScript gets it the worst out of all of the languages. I don’t see those guys whining.
What I will say is that the majority of PHP developers I interact with on this post has led me to believe that there is a number of PHP developers that take things way to personally that they really shouldn’t. Seriously you guys aren’t doing your language any favors. No one’s going to want to join the whine club.
I used php for 2 years and I hate on it it’s not just people who’ve never used it
no clue what your point is.
The comment above claimed only people who never used PHP hate on it. The point was a counter claim to that.
Ok I can add another group to my list then: bad php developers
Good developers don’t get tribal about the tools they use
It makes them able to switch away from them for better ones
I use typescript now
This entire thread is a tribal post that I had a problem with!! You don’t seem to understand this but I don’t care.
Hard sell. Calling people you know nothing about “bad developers” because they don’t like your tool on the other hand, that was cringe as hell and just made you look like you somehow tied your self-worth to php. “If my tool gets criticized; that means I’m being criticized!”
If you don’t give in to that, you start to see “Oh, that bug wouldn’t have happened if I’d been using [x]” and you become a better developer
When a woodworker cuts iself with a bandsaw, people who do what you do scream “He’s a bad woodworker!”
And while they’re screaming, we invented guardrails
level 1: “this argument is worthless because you are stupid!”
level 300: “everyone who hates php is just an idiot tbh”
Just standard discourse from the php community
There are reasons to dislike a language, but there are no reasons to hate a language, certainly not one that is as ubiquitous as PHP. There’s no argument you could make for why someone hates a programming language.
Introducing bugs into code way more often than others with similarly skilled programmers is one good reason to hate it…
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I get hating on PHP is a meme, and the language certainly has faults, but I feel like it’s no more arbitrary than how JavaScript behaves. And just like JavaScript, if you follow modern standards and use a modern version, it’s a much better experience. The language is only as good as the programmer.
but I feel like it’s no more arbitrary than how JavaScript behaves
This is not the flex you think it is.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive, but so is not bracketing things in ternary operations.
You know that programmers of other languages don’t have to find excuses for their tool constantly, right?
You don’t know many languages, huh?
Wat.
If you think PHP is weird, go look up ZZT-OOP, the scripting language from Tim Sweeney’s first game.
(No, a scripting language for game characters doesn’t need integers. If you need to count, you can do that by moving blocks around on the game board. It’s halfway between LOGO and Minecraft.)
Now do CGI.
Please. I worked with it for five years and I still don’t understand it.
Finally got it…
$a == 1 ? "one" : ( ( $a == 2 ? "two" : $a == 3 ) ? "three" : "other" )
