PHP

Yesterday I have had the joy of writing some php code. It was marvelous. minutes later a syntax error popped from a regular function taking a string. I called my colleague, who had experience with php. We were both stumped. It used eval. I guess we are both dumb.

Php is so simplistic and easy to understand, it's painful. If I pass an undeclared constant off to a function, php goes all the way to interpret it as its own name for me. I guess that would make some code more readable. Why mix foo with "bar"? This syntax allows us to just go all the way and use constant name syntax everywhere. Then we just don't declare the constants supposed to be those strings. Such advanced magic.

They say that the best technology is indistinguishable from magic. I say the best technology goes ahead and makes my code run more easily, even if it has bugs which will pop up later. It's so smart right? Who cares about tomorrow? Everybody knows code is written just once and doesn't need to be maintained or anything like that.

Code for today. Write no abstractions. Php allows the ultimate freedom. If you want to shoot yourself in the foot, just do it. It's not like there is anything stopping you at all. It's your job, not mine. You know what you are doing. We all know that php is a language for experts, everyone will know better than to carelessly use unsanitized user input to form SQL queries (and HTML too!) It all comes from $_GET clean and safe with your magic slashes right?

</sarcasm>

It's not a language problem as much as it is a cultural problem. Although the former appears to have caused the latter.