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PHP Bugs Me, or Where Type Coercion Causes Bugs
I really like PHP as a technology, both for its extensibility and its deployment style. I think it is the quickest and most straightforward platform to create web applications with, and frameworks like CodeIgniter make it even better.
I've long been on the fence regarding PHP's type coercion and comparison issues, but a recent bug in Mantis Bug Tracker has made me /facepalm for the first time in my long history of working with PHP:
When I click on "Edit" next to 1.2, mantis shows me the 1.20 properties. When I click 1.1 it shows me 1.10!
The offending snippet of code:
foreach( $g_cache_versions as $t_version ) {
if ( ( $t_version['version'] == $p_version )
&& ( $t_version['project_id'] == $c_project_id ) ) {
return $t_version['id'];
}
}
At first glance, it seems perfectly normal... and then you read the commit log, emphasis mine:
This is due to an incorrect version name comparison in version_get_id whereby the following check between strings was occurring:
if( "1.1" == "1.10" ) { ... }PHP evaluates this expression to true because 1.1 and 1.10 are treated as floats. We however need to preserve the string type during this comparison, thus we need to use the === comparison operator instead.
I thought I'd seen it all...
On the Inelegance of PHP
As a well-seasoned PHP developer for MantisBT and other projects, but at the same time a seasoned developer in Python, C++, Lua, etc, I found this interesting article on Hacker News, Yet, a short piece on the "history" and development of PHP as a language.
A few choice quotes that I most enjoyed:
I don't know anyone who programs in PHP and hasn't ... become much more acquainted with the concept of "haystack" and "needle" than any one person should have to in a lifetime.
With time, an experienced developer learns that the only reason why any particular functionality is not in PHP is that it's not there — yet.
Invariably, PHP developers who try to settle into a framework have the (often irresistible) urge to simply drop it and write their own, because, you see, there is no framework that does things the way he or she wants — yet.
I really like working on the PHP projects that I'm a part of, but every time I write a Python script to do something, it just reminds me of how unsophisticated PHP really is as a language. Perhaps that's OK; it certainly hasn't stopped me... yet.
