In PHP though the STDlib is not very well thought out, it may be fun(needle,haystack) or fun(haystack,needle) and you just have to remember
empty() will do weird stuff like a string with the value "0" is also empty, so not great for parsing things.
A lot of footguns and the best way to avoid that is with a decent linter that lets you be picky
another thing I mention is avoiding the array_ stuff because of aformentioned reasons, it's easier to remember/reason about boring loops unfortunately.
I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.
Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
> Ruby is dying
How exactly do you define these “objective” criteria for such sensationalism?
What actual criticism of PHP is anyone shying away from?
PHP got bashed for such a long time, while simply nothing steps up to do what it does better. Something that, for example, is available on every webhost you can just throw files at, where all (meaningful) config and state can be in those files.
Why do I bring up containers? Because part of why PHP was so dope in this way was the way you can just define 1 file per endpoint and drop it in public_html, and have no server setup to do. Running say, Rails or ASP.NET or a Java site back then meant doing… a lot more, to your server.
But with Docker, you can just steal a good Dockerfile template from someone else, and it’s just like 3-4 simple files for you to manage for a simple Sinatra (Ruby) or node.js version of the “one-off PHP file” things.
edit: Granted, I agree that if you want to do all sorts of things on the internet, maybe PHP is not the right choice. But for simple, dynamic web things that I want to just make and then run like this forever, that I can work on but don't have to? PHP and vanilla HTML and Javascript are where it's at for me, hands down. Everything else I know is either too new or seems to have constant churn or issues. That you hear nothing about PHP other than complaining it's "outdated" or whatever from the outside -- always "why are you using this?" never "why oh why am I using this?" -- is because it just hums along, IMO. I like it better than Python, and I kinda view it as in that class.
Unfortunately newer versions of PHP killed it and it's dead now, and even more unfortunately while PHP absorbed a lot of features from Hack, native XML was not one of them. There was even going to be a Hack version of the Composer package manager but that never got finished AFAIK. Distros stopped supporting it. I think I still have my half-finished attempt at a Hacker News fork in Hack sitting around on a hard drive somewhere. I can't even find an environment to run it in anymore.