William Reardon’s Blog

My first exposure to PHP was almost a year ago. I volunteered to help my place of employment put together a 9/11 tribute site.

I ran into… well, some squirrelly parts of PHP. However, it was a project that demanded very little sleep for several days, not to mention a lot of things seem just wierd when you first learn a language. So I dismeed those concerns.

I’m now on a project that may result in my using PHP for an extend period of time. The more I learn about PHP, the more concerned I get about that extended period of time. Using PHP 4 feels like I’m using Perl 4. Okay, there are multi-dimensional arrays, but a lot of it still comes across as undeveloped and, in some cases, just wrong.

For example, symbolic references are re-invented. Not only are they re-invented they are given a very stupid name: variable variables. If your defending PHP by saying “But Perl has those too!”, fair enough. But note that it’s generally regarded as a Bad Idea to use them, and that “use strict” turns them off.

$php–;

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2003 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.