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PHP has a bunch of hacks that are here for technical reasons. Function names are inconsistent and terse because they were inherited from C, and there is the his
by remram 4y ago
PHP has a bunch of hacks that are here for technical reasons. Function names are inconsistent and terse because they were inherited from C, and there is the historical name-resolution quirk. The prefixed variable names don't bring anything and are not here for any good reason (compared to shell where "naked" identifiers are interpreted as strings). A lot of the object-oriented features had to settle for unusual tokens like backslashes. You might find that the PHP syntax is objectively problematic.
For Java, Rust, etc it's a bit different. I would say that's up to taste. Using "public static" is very verbose but more obvious than @ or _ prefixes.
- nimih 4y agoI agree with your specific assessments here, but I was trying to get at the question of whether there are meaningful and measurable differences in the broad-scale accessibility of e.g. whitespace-centric syntax vs lispy syntax vs curly-brace syntax. Admittedly, it's hard to tease this apart from the standard library and communal conventions of any given language: Java occasionally devolving into an endless sequence of ProducerFactoryFactory.newProducerFactory().initializeProducerBuilder(new ProducerBuilder())... certainly impacts its readability in a practical sense, just as the Haskell community's perhaps ill-advised love of point-free programming and highest-order polymorphism doesn't always do it favors on the readability front. Those sort of details seem like they'd really complicate a rigorous and systematic study, but on the other hand, lacking a good methodology has never stopped _other_ supposed quantitative studies of programming languages as they relate to e.g. "developer productivity" and "defect rates," so who's to say...
- orf 4y agoWhat’s the historical name resolution quirk?