On 12/26/06, A. Pagaltzis <[email protected]> wrote:
Although the Perl Slogan is There's More Than One Way to Do
It, I hesitate to make 10 ways to do something. :-)
---Larry Wall in <[email protected]>
PHP does not hesitate. There is only a single s/// operator in
Perl; PHP has 4 different ones. There is only one way to quote
values in Perl's DBI and it's rarely necessary to use it; PHP
gives you 4 ways if you are using MySQL, 3 of which are wrong.
There is only one sort() function in Perl; there are, and I'm
not making this up, 12 array sort functions in PHP.
Aristotle is actually being remarkably kind to PHP here, failing to
mention the TWO THOUSAND FUNCTIONS IN THE MAIN NAMESPACE, many of
which are synonyms for each other, and most of which have wildly
inconsistent invocation patterns. There is the total brain death of
its compiler, not helped by the fact that anonymous functions are done
by eval()ing strings. And the documentation which, while not hugely
helpful, has entertaining comment threads on every page in which PHP's
many fans attempt to outdo each other in providing the stupidest way
of doing something fairly simple.
At least in the PHP5 version of OOP, objects are now passed by
reference by default. This is in contrast to PHP4, where they were
passed by value. By default. I am not making that up.
All in all, it's easily the most hateful "dynamic" language in
existence. Much of the job that I had for the past 12 months consisted
of programming in it, during which I had to take a "Tourette's break"
every 30 mins. Now do you see why I direct so much hate at the Perl
community?
-- Yoz
