Keith Devens .com

God I hate PHP

PHP is one of the worst languages in use today. It's OO is so badly broken that I've been swearing all night at it. At one point tonight I thought what I've been trying to do would actually be much easier in Java!

Objects keep getting copied when I don't want them to, and I spend so long staring at it trying to figure out where that is. Some of my code even looks like this:

$p = &new StParagraphRecognizer($this);
$b = &new StBlockquoteRecognizer($this);
$t = &new StTextRecognizer($this);

$this->recognizers = array(
ST_PARA => &$p,
ST_BLOCKQUOTE => &$b,
ST_TEXT => &$t
);

just to avoid making copies, because you can't say something like ST_PARA => &new StParagraphRecognizer($this). Damn you PHP.

Update (2/25): It turns out (via a comment on the appropriate page in the PHP manual) that if you have your constructor always return a reference you can avoid having to do this. I haven't verified that this works, but it seems like it would. It doesn't change the fact that PHP's OO is fundamentally broken. In PHP 5 (with the Zend engine v2) PHP's OO will be more "normal" (i.e. more like Java), where objects have reference (pointer) semantics by default, and you have to copy explicitly (there're also other nice things built in).

After reading this, I'm wondering if I could find a host that has good support for Python, and switch over to that. There are lots of PHP-like solutions in Python (that link is just one among many). I don't know how they compare to PHP speed-wise, but anyway...

Update: It turns out there's a page in the manual that refers to this specific problem.

Permalink | 2 Comments | Tags: Programming | id 3493

04:42 (utc-5)
edited: 2003-03-09 23:19 (utc-5)