On 28 July 2013 09:52, Виталий Филиппов <vitalif(a)yourcmc.ru> wrote: Except, you know, that is not entirely true. PHP's weak dynamic types causes numerous problems. You cannot compare strings in order to sort them, you need to convert individual characters to their ASCII/Unicode value and compare it that way (and that in itself is not always perfect, because their value may not be in the same order as humans consider an appropriate sorting[0]). If I do `"10" == 10' in PHP, PHP will yield true. I can force it to say false (because they are not the same type) by using '===' (except - of course - PHP developers fails to understand what the === operator is for[1]).

But if I do `"10" < 11' in PHP, it will yield true,

because < does what == does (converts the types), but there is no way to tell PHP, I don't want that.

Particularly because int nor str doesn't exist in the language, you

cannot cast things in PHP to control your types.

Furthermore, PHP has an annoying habit of doing stuff without warning you. I recommend you reading this article: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

This is one of the main reasons I stopped contributing to MediaWiki; I simply got tired of writing in PHP. I don't like a language where I constantly have to circumvent it, because its developers are stupider than I am. [0] Of course, no other languages solves this issue as well, so that's another thing. [1] === compares values and type… except with objects, where === is only true if both operands are actually the same object! For objects, == compares both value (of every attribute) and type, which is what === does for every other type. Wat. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

On 28 July 2013 17:48, Robert Cummings &lt;robert(a)interjinn.com&gt; wrote: No, they don't. They only exist in the context you describe below: Can I do var_dump(int);? Well, it turns out the only thing you can do is casting, but even casting in PHP is rather pointless. I have been doing a lot of debugging PHP in my time, and I know how it works. That doesn't change the fact that it is rather annoying and a tedious process compared to other languages. I also like that other languages *tell* you stuff, rather than having to know all these small quirks in a language; this create language overhead, meaning a programmer needs to contain a lot of information readily available when programming. And for what? So I can save 10 minutes when setting up, but enduring 6 months of torture? Yeah, I think I'll pass. PHP wasn't chosen for MediaWiki because it was the language the development team (at least the current) liked the best; but because the first developer on MediaWiki chose it. And that's that.

On 28 July 2013 18:43, Petr Bena &lt;benapetr(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: To give you an answer that isn't just PHP bashing (by the way, I am no big fan of Python myself); I think it has a lot to do with more corporations having skin in the game. Large companies like Google have invested in Python, but few have invested in PHP. Well, at least not prominent ones like Google. This gives Python a sense of 'serious language' compared to PHP's 'hobby language' sentiment. And some programmers looks down on PHP's hobby language status. You can argue whether that is fair or not. But Python is a different beast all together; its initial purpose - as I recall - was fulfil those programs that were too large for bash scripts, but too simple for C-programs. It was not created for the web, it was later applied to it; and this you can tell in the language as well as its standard library. Python feels like a script language, it has not very good threading and concurrency mechanism, which have been added to the language later. Google even tried to improve Python, but eventually abandoned that plan and came up with Go instead. There doesn't exist popular frameworks like Django (which I also loath) for PHP, because PHP's standard library (well bindings) fulfils much of task itself. I don't mind Python's indentation syntax, but I don't like its underscored standard functions (like __init__) and whatnot; they look incredibly ugly. I also don't like that you have to create a __init__.py file in a directory to make it a package; that seems silly to me (and ugly). As for why Python is cool? Because it tries some new things (look at the syntax) and it is a language more designed to the nature of being interpreted than compiled (which is a syntax PHP mimics). I remember personally being excited about Python when I first really met it back in 2007. But now that excitement has vanished. My issue with Python isn't so much setting it up (which is a pain itself, don't get me wrong), but it's the fact that it's standard library are rather missing on functionality for the web (there are plenty of frameworks, and whatnot, but not in its standard library), so I have to ask myself; what's the purpose of writing in Python rather than PHP? I'd rather write in neither. But hating PHP has traction, and you don't want to be the uncool guy who writes in PHP, so to some people, Python is the only option. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

And as I already stated once, I didn't start this discussion to start a war (not that I wouldn't like it) I just wanted to find out what's so cool on python and why in the world would people prefer it over php.

We all know that VIM is best editor out there :P