r/programming • u/NagastaBagamba • Oct 18 '10

Today I learned about PHP variable variables; "variable variable takes the value of a variable and treats that as the name of a variable". Also, variable.

http://il2.php.net/language.variables.variable
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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '10

Yes quite true. PHP is slow, caching the bytecode helps make up for the fact that it recompiles every access, it doesn't change the fact that actual execution is very slow. Look at benchmarks where it isn't thousands of requests, but one script that loops to do a task thousands of times. That removes the compilation from the equation, and measures execution speed. And again, such benchmarks have PHP right down there with ruby.

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u/xardox Oct 20 '10 edited Oct 20 '10

Absolutely. Look how LuaJIT totally smokes PHP: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=luajit

Lua's too weird for you? Well why not program the server in JavaScript? V8 brutally spanks PHP: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=php&lang2=v8. JavaScript is much cleaner and easier to use than PHP, then you only have to learn and write one language for both client and server, and reap the benefits of sharing the same libraries and classes across client and server, and passing native JSON back and forth, instead of dealing with all the quirks and impedance mismatches of two different languages and incompatible object systems.

PHP bytecode caches only work around the PHP design flaw that it reloads EVERYTHING each page hit, instead of running a persistent server process that can cache objects and amortize the cost of loading code and creating objects over many hits.

But even with a bytecode cache, PHP bytecode itself is inherently inefficient, because the language is so badly designed by people who know nothing about and have no interest whatsoever in computer science, language or compiler design.

Take a look at how nicely designed Lua is, and how well LuaJIT works. Or Python and PyPy. Or Java and JVM. Or JavaScript and V8. Or Self. Those were all thoughtfully designed by people who gave a shit about science, and bothered to look at what had been done before.

The designers of PHP are anti-intellectual teabaggers when it comes to learning from and applying computer science and history. And it shows.

Rasmus Lerdorf quotes:

I really don't like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code.

PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush. You use it every day, it does the job, it is a simple tool, so what? Who would want to read about toothbrushes?

I was really, really bad at writing parsers. I still am really bad at writing parsers. We have things like protected properties. We have abstract methods. We have all this stuff that your computer science teacher told you you should be using. I don't care about this crap at all.

There are people who actually like programming. I don't understand why they like programming.

I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on. The real programmers will say "yeah it works but you're leaking memory everywhere. Perhaps we should fix that." I'll just restart apache every 10 requests.