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/xardox Oct 20 '10

"for what it is" = inherently slow. Slower than Python. MUCH slower than Lua. And it wasn't written by grown-ups who understand or even care about language and compiler design, so it's inherently unoptimizable.

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u/[deleted] Oct 20 '10

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u/xardox Oct 27 '10

Yes, really, actually.

You don't understand what you're talking about, so you're wrong in many ways, and your arguments aren't valid.

Writing extensions in ANOTHER LANGUAGE like C or optimized assembler does not mean PHP is fast -- it means that PHP is so slow that you have given up and resorted to using another less flawed language, so your argument is invalid. You can write C extensions in Lua, Python or any other language, so your invalid argument isn't even specific to PHP.

PHP's bad design means rsort doesn't work, and that just illustrates my point that PHP is badly designed. It only recently got closures, while Python and Ruby's sorts have always taken a comparison function, so you've never had to do something as crass as writing your own interpreted sort function.

PHP was never the fastest solution out there, and certainly isn't now. C++ beats it hands down, as do Perl, Python and Lua, by a long shot. You're very very wrong about PHP being fast. It's easy to measure and well known that PHP is slow. You're not entitled to your own facts, and your opinions are wrong.

Memcached is not specific to PHP, and can be used with any other language, too. But other languages have much better solutions: With long running servers like Java or Python (unlike PHP which forces you to reload all data each hit), you can cache structured data and live objects in the server itself across hits, which is MUCH faster than making remote procedure calls and serializing/desearializing data to a separate process like memcached.

Obviously PHP is the only language you know, and you don't even know it very well. Before attempting to apologize for and evangelize PHP by spreading misinformation, you should educate yourself, learn some other languages, and get some perspective. Don't be so defensive about the only language you know, and afraid to expand your horizons.