Facebook's "HipHop Virtual Machine" released

Posted Dec 12, 2011 17:31 UTC (Mon) by bo (subscriber, #56215) [Link]

Posted Dec 13, 2011 13:41 UTC (Tue) by jond (subscriber, #37669) [Link]

Posted Dec 12, 2011 21:49 UTC (Mon) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link]

Java of course is a completely different matter. Very nice language, but hurt fingers very much to type so many words...

At first having a nice IDE was just fun, but now the first thing I do before the very first main() is that I setup an environment with a nice and fancy IDE. This is specially useful for Java, when IDE integrates well with compiler. Last time I used Eclipse for Java I hardly had to type anything! (yes maybe just once for declaration). One may prefer vim and big tags, also makes life very pleasant.

Posted Dec 12, 2011 22:31 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

So yeah, PHP could have been better and nowadays it is much better than 3.x series, but if you look at the alternatives, you might appreciate it more.

Are you sure? Out of popular contemporary languages two are the worst by far: PHP and JavaScript. Well, bash is close (if you want to call it "programming langauge").

The problem is not in some language constructs but in the very core of these languages. They were designed to "help" the developer. If construct makes no sense (for example if you try to compare integer and string) then PHP and JavaScript try to do "something sensible". The end result is disaster. When your language can declare that "A == B", "B == C" yet "A != C" or if asseritions "A < B", "B < C" and "C < A" are all true... it's hard to be sure in anything. Well, you can use === exclusively (but this makes PHP similar to bash where natural thing creates problems and proper thing look unnatural), but there are no easy solution to second problem.

JavaScript is necessary evil: it's impossible to do any web programming without JavaScript. But PHP... just say no. Easy and simple.

P.S. You may say that C exhibit similar idiosyncratic behavior when floating point is involved. Sure - but floating point is pretty hard to do right in any language. This is well-known problem with similarly simple solution: use fixed point where you can floating point where you must and be extra careful if you do. In PHP it does not help you much...

Posted Dec 13, 2011 9:48 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

So yeah, PHP could have been better and nowadays it is much better than 3.x series, but if you look at the alternatives, you might appreciate it more.

At first, I was rude about PHP because I heard so many security horror stories. Now, having used it, I am rude about PHP because I have seen it for what it is: a vessel of fertilizer.

(All of its good features can be found elsewhere, and most "elsewheres" have less annoying bad features.)

Posted Dec 13, 2011 22:46 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

I like PHP too. To my surprise, I should add. I have written code in a lot of "serious" languages, and I always thought that PHP was the equivalent of ASP. Now that I know it it can be messy, comparisons are horrid, there are hundreds of primitives, many types of null... and yet the class model is nice, the syntax is mostly consistent (except where it's not), and it generally does what you want. It has everything you want and somehow it mixes well.

Reminds me of the Friends scene where Joey is eating a cake which mistakenly contains custard, beef, fruit and whatnot:

I like it! I mean, what's in it not to like? Jam? Good! Custard? Good! Meat??? Gooood!!!

And JavaScript, well, you call it clean but for me it's the king of messiness. Its object model (prototypes) is completely horrid, you can mix functions and objects (associative arrays in fact) in a thousand ways. And yet it somehow rules! Furthermore, it has achieved what Lisp and Python failed to do: it has brought functional programming to the masses (in the form of callbacks).

I do not miss Java or (gods forbid) C in the least.