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The presence of some quirks isn't the issue. Of course every programming language has some. PHP and JavaScript, however, have unjustifiable quirks with some of
by Pacabel 12y ago
The presence of some quirks isn't the issue. Of course every programming language has some.
PHP and JavaScript, however, have unjustifiable quirks with some of their most basic functionality. We're talking about stuff as basic as their comparison operators being quite broken, for example. That's where the problem is. Furthermore, the fact that these issues have been around for well over a decade or more without being properly addressed just makes the situation even worse.
Compared to other mainstream languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Ruby and even Perl, both PHP and JavaScript are quite inferior in many critical ways. Perhaps things will improve over time, but we really haven't seen that happen so far.
So let's not pretend that they're "good" just to be politically correct or to try to avoid offending anyone. PHP and JavaScript aren't good languages, and they won't really improve until their communities admit that there are some very serious issues, and then commit to getting them resolved properly and rapidly.
- Dewie 12y ago> The presence of some quirks isn't the issue. Of course every programming language has some. It is a very weird argument that often comes up when discussing programming languages - "Lang X is weird/stupid in some ways, but no language is perfect, so it's fine and there is no reason to call it out." So, because nothing is perfect (almost by definition), it apparently isn't a big deal that some things are weird/dumb/broken. And let's also just muddy the waters by implying that, since all languages have imperfections, talking about some other language's imperfections is just being pointlessly selective (even though one of the languages imperfections are much more horrible). It's just overall a non-argument. Maybe the point is to come off as being "above" the opposite camp (which are: mindless language bashers). But it's about as intellectually stimulating as mindless language bashing: it doesn't take much intellectual curiosity or rigour to bash a language, and neither does being perfectly neutral and non-offensive by throwing around platitudes like "no language is perfect", "choose the right tool for the job", etc.
- mike_hearn 12y agoExactly. The trend in modern languages is to try and eliminate as many surprising quirks as possible. If you look at Kotlin, it's basically advertised as resolving around half of the famous Java Puzzlers. And those puzzlers were themselves introduced by the authors with the proviso that Java has remarkably few quirks for something so very large, and that this is/was tremendous progress.
- Dewie 12y agoI'll stress that I was agreeing with Pacabel, which might not be apparent from looking at the quote I chose to use in isolation.