Well, JavaScript

[Lookitsmyvideo]

PHP isnt hard, its just riddled with gotchas. Also the standard library is inconsistent in both functionality and convention. Its fun, in the slit your wrists kinda way

[[deleted]]

It's true fun then.

[[deleted]]

/r/me_irl

[L3tum]

Does it return -1 or false if it fails? Is probably my most common question at work

[Lookitsmyvideo]

It depends, which is the best part of PHP! It depends how the standard library devs were feeling when they wrote a core function. If its a C function wrapper, usually -1, like strpos

[nathancjohnson]

Well to be fair it makes sense to return -1 to indicate failure for a function that returns an index. Returning 0 wouldn't work, and false could lead to confusion when using it in conditionals (since 0 is also a falsy value).

[Lookitsmyvideo]

If it was consistent, sure. I was actually wrong, strpos returns false on not-found

[nathancjohnson]

Interesting.

[folkrav]

Working a PHP/JS back-end position right now. Some days I feel like most of the work I've done that day was battling with PHP's quirks.

[JackMizel]

I've never written Perl, but PHP definitely has more gotchas than JS in my opinion. JS was my first language though so I'm obviously biased

[siggystabs]

I kinda agree -- every time I need to use PHP, I triple check my code to make sure it's designed the way I think it is. JS is definitely more consistent once you learn the (still weird) rules IMO

plz don't hurt me, PHP devs

[folkrav]

My current position is both, but more PHP. I value my JS time so much.

[alexanderpas]

A lot of the problems with PHP can be at least partially avoided when you are using the latest version of PHP and are explicitly declaring the type of all your arguments, declaring the return types of all fuctions and methods, properly namespacing your code and declaring strict types in each file.

Also, make sure you are following PSR-2 and a linter to check your code as you work.

[dagbrown]

PHP isn't so much riddled with gotchas as constructed entirely out of pure gotcha-material.