[Webdev] playing with python

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 04:18:44PM +0000, John P. Looney wrote:

>  Well, it's an advantage over Perl in that it's not crap[0]. :-P

OK - you, me and the edged weapons when ?[1]

>  PHP's idea of OO is a joke. I've been badly bitten by it's "define a
> class, and then I'll let you assign $class->anything whenever you want".
> 
>  The concept of typechecking has been around years. Bah. Stuff like:
> 
>     class host {
>             var $name;
>             var $host_ip; 
>             var $status;
>         }
> 
>  and later, you do;
> 
>      $newhost= new host;
> 
>      $host->name "eric";
>      $host->ip   "192.3.2.3";
>      $host->status="down";
> 
>  and later in your code, you do:
> 
>      $host->statu="up";
> 
>  You won't find that bug unless you know that status isn't "down". Nasty.
> You would expect it at least to throw a warning. 

Oh jeez Louise - isn't that just wonderful. I'm under a certain amount of
pressure to learn PHP (I just yesterday debugged my first PHP program on a
production system. So what, says you ? Well, I'd never written a PHP program
before (apart from <?phpinfo()?> just to see the status of an apache
installation) so it speaks volumes for how easy it is to use when you've a
background in a few other languages (not Cobol, thank God).

However, that automagic variable instantiation is a total piece of crap. I
was astonished when PHP 4 came out that it hadn't inherited something like
"use strict" from Perl. Another cutie I saw in PHP recently was where a
working piece of code in PHP 4.wx stopped working in 4.yz (I can't remember
the exact values of wx and yz, except that wx < yz). It was along the lines of

if (a && b && c) {   

# forgive my PHP syntax - a, b, & c were a mix of variables & expressions

and the fix was to rewrite it as

if (a) {
   if (b & c) {
   
   
Aargh !

The guy who fixed it uses PHP quite a bit and he just regarded it as a PHP
thing (this, mind you, is the same person who said, when I complained that
Word on MacOS wouldn't save a file, complaining that the disk was full [it
had > 1G free], "Yeah, that's a known Word bug" - as you can guess, he's a
more tolerant software user than am I. He wants me to use MS Entourage on OS
X as my email client and finds my "Over my cold dead body" response hard to
understand.


Niall