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Does the fact that it's used by large websites change the fact that it's a poorly designed language?
by cmelbye 13y ago
Does the fact that it's used by large websites change the fact that it's a poorly designed language?
- unavoidable 13y agoDoes the fact that it's a poorly designed language change the fact that it's a useful one?
- koide 13y agoNo, but it certainly puts the importance of good language design in perspective. We tend to overvalue good design just for good design's sake.
- mikeash 13y agoIt puts the importance of good language design in perspective in two completely different ways, though! You're completely correct, but at the same time, PHP also stands as a stark warning not to throw things together with no design, lest your misshapen child end up being immortalized. PHP is simultaneously the best-case outcome and the worst-case outcome for a badly designed language.
- MichaelGG 13y agoIn what perspective? PHP doesn't have to bear the weight of many other programmers dealing with their suboptimal design decisions. A popular DB had an intentional feature that lost data on 32-bit builds. You might not get bitten until you've gotten plenty of data in it - it's still a terrible design that hurts everyone.
- Yver 13y agoYou'd have to qualify what "poorly designed" means or even what language you're talking about. In that mail, Lerdorf recounts his time writing PHP/FI nearly twenty years ago. It's like judging the current Linux kernel based on the early version Linus Torvalds was using in his lab around the same time.
- tptacek 13y agoThe filesystem layout on Linux was never pessimized in order to work around using string length (STRING LENGTH) as a hash function.
- shoyer 13y ago...except PHP still has htmlspecialchars as a core library function. If Linux ever had these some of warts, they were resolved long ago.
- ars 13y agoNo they weren't. Go look at the TTY driver if you need an example. Any place you interface with user code you are stuck.