PHP4 and 5

How big a difference is there between PHP4 and 5? I'm writing my PHP scripts in PHP5, but my webhost only supports PHP4.

There shouldn't be an issue unless you go deep into sessions. I think they extrapolated greatly on that in PHP5.

The difference is that they both suck

Aww, .oisyn. Why hating on PHP?

The only difference I've encountered in practice was that PHP4 is missing a few date/time manipulation functions that PHP5 has. But this was just a minor inconvenience (difference between writing idate(blah) and intval(date(blah))).

Oh come on, the whole reason for the success of PHP is that hosting is widely available and it's fairly simple to get it started. Which is indeed a good thing.

But the pro's end there, the con's are that it's a terribly hobby project gone bad. The whole language and library is inconsistent and poorly designed. They tried to give PHP a more professional image with PHP 5 by implementing better OO functionality but they failed miserably.

If you ask me, it's time for the Zend team to start completely from scratch with a good designed language. But I don't want to turn this thread in a PHP discussion, my previous post was more meant as a joke than as a troll, so I'll keep my mouth shut from now on

@.oisyn: Well, as long as you have brought it up... What is your favored alternative?

Well there isn't any, actually, I use PHP myself . Or you should consider Java servlets or ASP(.Net) as alternatives, but I think they are both much too bloated to write a simple script. PHP has definitely an advantage there.

I once had the idea to create an alternative loose-typed scripting language with a syntax more closer to C++, but I don't really have the time to write it

That's about what I thought you would say. I am inclined to agree with you though.

I think .oisyn mostly expresses the frustration of coding. We want to make the simple things quickly, without all the tedious typing. But there just isn't such a product.

Have a look at Ruby On Rails, though. The concept is pretty interesting, even if I doubt it's usefullness in real situations.

I've heard good things about RoR; but I haven't been able to use it yet. I should pick it up some time.

That said, PHP has a definite advantage of being almost ubiquitous and being very easy to write in.

Personally I don't mind PHP. I haven't done much PHP5, but PHP4 + Smarty usually makes me pretty happy.

Originally Posted by geon

I think .oisyn mostly expresses the frustration of coding. We want to make the simple things quickly, without all the tedious typing. But there just isn't such a product.

No, I'm talking about the actual bad design of the language. The current concepts of globals and references, for example, are a crime and definitely need to go. And why is null equal to a zero-length string or 0? And why is "12ab" equal to 12? And why don't the [] and () operators work on the result of a function call, while all other operators do work? And continue in a switch, what's up with that?

Originally Posted by .oisyn

And why is "12ab" equal to 12? And why don't the [] and () operators work on the result of a function call, while all other operators do work?

The "12ab" == 12 part seems natyural to me. At least if you are comparing a string with an int, without any preparations of the string. Remember, you could easily make it "12ab" == 12."" if you wanted the comparision to be more strict. Or you could be even more strict by making it "12ab" === 12, but that would only be usefull to protect you from type missmatch.

I agree totally though on the [] and () operators. Totally stupid. Should be fixed.

The "12ab" == 12 part seems natyural to me

Not to me, the string "12ab" shouldn't be convertible to an int. For example, suppose I've written forumsoftware and you want to access a topic using the url forum.php?topic=topicnumber. "12ab" for topicnumber is an invalid index, it should definitely not get topic 12. But there's no good way to detect whether such a string is really a number, the is_int function only checks for the runtime type of the variable, and because it's a string it returns false. A check against (int)12 returns true, even $topic == (int)$topic returns true.

If you really want to check if a value is an int you should do $a == (string)(int)$a. I'm sorry, but that's just bad design in my book. The autoconversion routines should be way more strict than they currently are, this will also solve a lot of newbie problems.

Jumping back in, I like working with PHP. I get things done with it a lot quicker than with ASP(.NET). I doubt it would be used by so many websites and companies if they didn't think the same
BTW, like these forums? They're written in PHP

Success is no good reason for not being critical

Originally Posted by monjardin

@.oisyn: Well, as long as you have brought it up... What is your favored alternative?

I've heard many people saying Ruby was a very well designed scripting language. I haven't tried it yet though.

@ProgramWizard: Most popular forums are written in PHP, simply because it interacts nicely with MySQL, has good hosting support and is very easy to script in.

Me, I love PHP, it is my favourite language, but after all, I'm not a coder. I think Perl is good for more extensive things, and if you really want to go hard, ASP code-behind is undeniably powerful. At the end of the day though, for most situations, PHP makes sense, and damn it makes it easy.

A bit off-topic, but I've heard of people getting masters degrees in PHP. Not sure why I wanted to bring that up...

[pedantic]
I've never heard of a "Masters in C++" myself, either.
[/pedantic]

Originally Posted by eddie

[pedantic]
I've never heard of a "Masters in C++" myself, either.
[/pedantic]

Huh? I've heard of a Master's degree in C++...

How pointless, what would such a master's degree involve?

Knowing how to program really good in whatever language you got it for, I guess. Maybe it would also entail all of the common API's for the language.

We want to make the simple things quickly, without all the tedious typing. But there just isn't such a product.

ASP.Net gives you this ability quite nicely. I can actually get products to market much faster using ASP.Net than PHP -- both of which I consider myself an expert programmer with, except I've used ASP.Net for only 4 years, and PHP for closer to 10.

Huh? I've heard of a Master's degree in C++...

There is no such thing. You might have a Masters Degree in CS, but not in C++ or PHP directly. There is NO way a school would dedicate an entire masters program to such a small subset, nor would anyone pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars a Masters Degree costs. (Btw, I have two Masters degrees, so I have been through the process of selecting from the list...)

DS

Originally Posted by darqSHADOW

PHP for closer to 10.

You mean PHP has been out for over 10 years

Originally Posted by ProgramWizard

Knowing how to program really good in whatever language you got it for, I guess. Maybe it would also entail all of the common API's for the language.

Maybe for a college degree, but I don't see that being a master's degree.