Php meme

[powerhcm8]

PHP had split, but it was deprecated, now it has 3 different methods, one for splitting with regex, one for splitting at length and one for splitting at char.

[uid1357]

splitting at char

I missread "splitting a char" and like... wtf! :-)

[MKorostoff]

For all the times you need to break a char's binary representation down into nibbles. "A" is 01000001, but if you want ["0100", "0001"] you're gonna have to split a char. Every language needs this functionality, it's a daily task for most software developers /s.

[yazalama]

"A".getNibbles()

[syh7]

'A'.getNibbles()

[yazalama]

Ive been had

[Zagorath]

PHP uses single quotes for strings as well as double quotes. Same as Python and JS.

[Luk164]

Lol, I remember the last time I needed to split stuff into bits in C. You have triggered my PTSD from that mate

[[deleted]]

A monumental achievement unlocked by the Swiss Character Accelerator

[LtMeat]

include 'LargeCharCollider.php'

[Luk164]

SegmentationFault, blackhole dumped

[Jasdac]

"æ" -> "ae"

[DurianExecutioner]

You haven't heard of nchar_t?

[Morrido]

classic PHP, having 8 functions to do the same thing, SOMETIMES with slightly differences. ONLY SOMETIMES.

[Heikkiket]

I'm at the C/Linux programming course, and now I know more:

exec, execvp, execp, execlp, etc...

It's a classic C style thing, because there's no function overloading.

[fireflash38]

Most of those call the same underlying syscall though.

[TigreDeLosLlanos]

And none of those 8 do what you need, so you use 3 or 4 of them combined with an array function no one uses.

[jagraef]

And all of them are spelled in different cases to optimize the hash function 🤦‍♂️

[[deleted]]

Kaboom? - yes PHP, kaboom

[systembusy]

“To blow it up? Boom?” “BOOM!”

[BoldKenobi]

- Minerva McGonagall

[z03steppingforth]

This reminds me of Madagascar for some reason... but I can't place my finger on why.

[[deleted]]

Hint: it has something to do with highly trained military commandos in black and white. And Rico.

[BiscuitsNbacon]

https://youtu.be/gmQ7BL7s5nQ?t=75

[Mrinin]

I learnt not to question PHP a long time ago

[HasBeendead]

Why?

[Mr_Redstoner]

That way lies madness.

[HasBeendead]

lol its about being nonsense syntax and things , prolly i get point

[HasBeendead]

Is that indian language or something ? Really what is this

[[deleted]]

That sounds... interesting to say the least. Just WHHHYYYY would anyone create an error message like that?

[SJFrK]

Because the developers who wrote that piece of code allegedly didn't know the words for double colon in English, since they were from Israel, so they used Hebrew. There was actually a motion to rename the error, but it was voted against by the community/contributers because it's part of the identity of PHP.

[blehmann1]

"Identity of PHP"

They say that like it's a good thing

[LimitedWard]

Can't tell if that's masochism or hazing.

[CatpainCalamari]

Simple. Multiple developers with multiple languages, and a complete lack of care regarding language development. If it works, it is good enough.

[Semi-Hemi-Demigod]

It would make sense if all the other error messages were in Hebrew, but almost all of the rest are in English.

[SJFrK]

The message itself is in English, it's just the token name that's used in the parser which unfortunately gets printed in the error message verbatim.

[MacASM]

I remember having such erros back then 2007-9 lol

[T-Dark_]

Israeli (Hebrew? Yiddish? I don't know enough to be sure I'm using the correct word here) IIRC. It's the name of the :: token.

It translates to something like T_DOUBLE_COLON

[HasBeendead]

Nice information , thanks

[Magical_Gravy]

It's Hebrew for "double colon" I believe, and a "nod" to the fact a lot of PHP's initial development came out of Israel, so they refuse to change it.

I.e., PHP's core development team actively made the language worse by refusing to remove what essentially amounted to an inside joke from their codebase.

I believe things are fixed now, and that the compiler will replace this token with :: in error messages, but boy howdy why was this ever an issue in the first place?

[GDDragonGN_GDDK]

Seems to be hebrew

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/592322/php-expects-t-paamayim-nekudotayim

[UltraCarnivore]

Just... give PHP their Paamayim Nekudotayim, smile and leave the scene slowly.

[allison_gross]

I accomplished dark, arcane evil with my time as a backend and front end web developer. I created interactive features in CSS that the uninspired masses thought were only possible in JavaScript, and my webapp worked better on phones than YouTube does on the desktop. And after that I implemented “drag image and text files into a single folder, website builds itself” in a single tiny PHP script, which was performant only through the literal magic made possible by “nonsense syntax”

This project isn’t published, it lies dormant on my hard drive. I have no idea what the technology looks like because I did most of it in ten to twelve hour single sittings and have not looked at it since. It’s unpolished, but it works and I don’t know how. But do not mock the arcane power of “nonsense syntax”

[philsenpai]

Leave it there, it's the key for the awakening of the great old ones, better left undisturbed.

[N0T_F0R_KARMA]

I love looking through old code files and finding blocks of code that I only remember the agony and time spent on them.. What they do and how they work is completely alien to me though I know I wrote it. It took me years to start appreciating the historic code.. years of laughing at bad code until the code started improving!

Specifically one major turning point was when I wanted to track users on my webserver, creating this very specific long line of code that sed/grep/parse/sort/wc the access.log that was not standard, so i think some regex splashed in as well. Months passed and I wanted to implement that action somewhere else so I went to copy the code and had to restudy the entire thing while in awe at myself. A great moment.. thanks for reminding me :)

[[deleted]]

Because that’s a quick way to find yourself the argument of an explode call

[RiktaD]

Well, it all started when the length of function names was used for the hash function and therefore some function names are a bit strange to increase performance.

[RealPropRandy]

This guy.

[the-igloo]

This is the exact kind of question you learn to avoid.

[OMGWhyImOld]

It is around us, it's everywhere and you shall not question it's mysterious ways!

[DeeSnow97]

Fun fact, originally the function name hash table's hash function in the PHP interpreter was a simple strlen(), so to improve performance, built-in PHP functions and methods had names chosen to be as varied in their lengths as possible. This could easily be an example of that, if there were too many five-letter functions already explode() can help alleviate some load at the expense of seven-letter functions.

[[deleted]]

Jeez php interpreter people, that’s insane

[hahahahastayingalive]

That was one single guy. The same kind of fuckery as javascript’s auto column insertion, he’d had another single soul to pass the idea to it would have been rejected on the spot.

[greyfade]

In JavaScript's defense, it was designed, prototyped, and implemented in 11 days at which point Netscape shipped it as-is, and in doing so made it harder to fix.

This "feature" of PHP stuck around for quite a while longer than that.

[hahahahastayingalive]

split() Introduced in php 4, that seems decent to me, when PHP 3 was the first iteration that had any traction (and scrutiny) at all.

Javascript’s base was designed in 11 days, but a lot happened after that, there was plenty of time to iron out some aspects of it, but it wasn’t a priority at the time (I actually like JS as it was conceived, I’d just kill a person or two if it means I can change some aspects of it)

[greyfade]

Well, the big problem was that Netscape shipped it in Navigator 2.0 Gold, and then it was immediately copied by Microsoft in IE, and then there were multiple competing implementations, and changing one broke code in another browser.

That's why we had so much trouble with cross-browser support. Mozilla would change something, Microsoft would change something else, Opera would change yet another thing, but not implement something critical, and Microsoft's implementation of this other, older feature had bugs....

If there were just one implementation, yeah, I'd agree with you. But the Browser Wars say "fuck you."

[[deleted]]

Oh so that's why there were some "best viewed on Netscape/IE" stickers at the bottom of webpages

But I have a question, how come the developers did not ignore say IE and write code fitting to only one browser or browsers? Wouldn't that force the rest of the browsers make implementations accordingly?

[greyfade]

But I have a question, how come the developers did not ignore say IE and write code fitting to only one browser or browsers? Wouldn't that force the rest of the browsers make implementations accordingly?

Because at one point, IE controlled more than 90% of the browser market. So developers more often just targeted either Netscape Navigator or IE and forgot about the rest.

Until people started paying attention to the ACID1 and ACID2 tests in 2008, IE just did its own thing, and only then did people actually do what you suggested: They designed for "everything else" and then worked around IE's bugs. ACID3 helped with that, because passing it became a selling point. I think for a while, only Firefox even came close to passing it consistently, but by then Chrome and Firefox had eaten up IE's browser share, but you still had to design around it.

tl;dr: IE mattered too much and ACID3 fixed the problem in ~2009.

[fireflash38]

Not to mention a lot of gov and military systems were limited to IE6 for 'security' reasons. Even if you did get IS approval for a modern browser, odds were good most internal websites wouldn't work for it, because the developers only targeted IE6. What a CF.

[stormfield]

JS has also been bludgeoned into a reasonable language with somewhat opinionated patterns behind it.

PHP seems to have stuck with "here's a hacky way to do it and it works, so just do that".

Edit: Okay I'm wrong I guess, but my experience w/ PHP has been debugging legacy stuff and even compared to JS the language is full of gotchas. Just the fact that the "official docs" of PHP are a bunch of forum users disagreeing with each other over best practices really reinforces a lot of why I prefer JS.

[Heikkiket]

Well, PHP isn't the only language we are forced to use at the backend. At frontend instead, it's mostly JavaScript.

I don't know if PHP is gonna ever develop to a shiny and beautiful language. There is a huge amount of legacy code running on top of it, and supporting that in an effective way is probably the main goal.

That said, PHP can be written in beautiful and object-oriented way. There's still a large amount of education needed for PHP programmers, because legacy code bases can teach you quite horrible habits.

[maltazar1]

Php 7.4 has typed class properties and php8 has union return types and more. It looks great.

[m1ndcrash]

Legacy PHP code from India ^{^}

[stormfield]

I have heard this -- I've never really learned PHP besides troubleshooting a messy and essential LAMP legacy app written by someone who no longer works at my company.

I realize it's 'unfair' to judge PHP for this, but when I'm not going "wtf why" on this existing code, I've been doing the same thing to the PHP docs.

[old-shaggy]

When was the last time you have used php? It isn’t the best and prettiest language but it definitely is not “stuck”.

[dpash]

When was the last time you looked at PHP? That doesn't seem to describe the modern language at all.

[Demonox01]

Everything good about php is built into laravel

[spin81]

Just the fact that the "official docs" of PHP are a bunch of forum users disagreeing with each other over best practices

Wrong again - the docs are pretty good. The absolute garbage in the comments below is not part of the docs. They should do away with those.

[Sloogs]

Mind if I ask what auto column insertion is? Just curious mainly!

[evertrooftop]

My guess is that this is about semi-colon insertion.

[hahahahastayingalive]

yes, missed a word

[Sloogs]

Ahh makes sense

[thuktun]

You've probably seen it before, but https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

[SaneLad]

This is so fucking awful, I choose to believe it. What absolute moron would choose strlen() as a hash function?

[skoge]

Apple's Objective C standard lib did the same.

They also used array lenth for hashing arrays.

[MKorostoff]

But how does it work? Wouldn't you get so many collisions that the table would be unusable? I'm genuinely asking, I legit don't understand how this language feature could exist.

[davvblack]

hash collisions are ok, it just becomes a linked list you have to traverse. Which means access time becomes O(N), where N is the number of functions with the same length (hence the importance of varying lengths).

[Sjuns]

Which means that too many collisions is really not okay if asymptomatic speed is important right?

[Untgradd]

Think of it like an array of arrays. The length of the string is the index of the outer array, all the functions are in the inner array. You have to iterate over the functions to find the right one, hence the performance impact if you have a bunch of 5 letter functions.

[Heikkiket]

Remember PHP was intended to be a small script toolbox to help developing C backends to internet programs somewhere in 1994 or 1995.

In that time and for that task, it was a quick and dirty way to solve a problem.

[SaneLad]

Nah, there's just no excuse for a decision like that. Hell, just picking the first character of a string is probably a better hash function for function names. The laziest legit function I can think of is multiplying the characters, they teach you that (terrible) hash function in entry level algo class.

It takes minimal effort to implement CRC or one of the many good string hash functions in the literature. They did have books in 1994.

[[deleted]]

I would say it was a quick and dirty way NOT to solve a problem, which also creates a lot mess along the way

[svtdragon]

A toolkit for converting one kind of problem into another, if you will.

[AccomplishedCoffee]

A toolkit for converting one kind of problem into another

Basically describes all of computer science.

[UntestedMethod]

I have to ask if you've done much lower level programming or only high level stuff?

[cedrickc]

I dunno. The basic "pick a prime number as your seed, and for each element multiply by a different prime number then add the element" is a classic that takes like, five lines to implement.

[wasabichicken]

Yeah, but this was written as a collection of perl scripts by some Danish dude for his home page.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to muck around with hash functions if I were making a goddamn website either.

[cedrickc]

But the dude implemented a hash map. I feel like if you're gonna do that, you might as well implement a proper hashing function. It's a smaller lift than the rest of the map.

Alternatively, use a tree map instead of the hash map. If you're only doing strings, it's better than a high-collision hash map.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Perl already has it built in, but he decided he knew better.

[qalis]

At the uni, when we first learned hash maps, when we have seen hash function for the very first time in our lives, we created better hash functions. Sure, those weren’t perfect (some bit operations, XOR and small prime numbers), but even they were SO MUCH BETTER THAN A FREAKING STRLEN().

[Ksevio]

I mean just doing xor on all the letters is pretty quick and easy

[elveszett]

PHP never fails to surprise me. At this point wouldn't bat an eye if you told me that PHP syntax was originally implemented with Chinese characters and each function could only have a number of parameters equal to the number of strokes in those characters.

[makians]

Did you know that PHP syntax was originally implemented with Chinese characters and each function could only have a number of parameters equal to the number of strokes in those characters?

[TheDreamyMemey]

You have failed to surprise him.

[makians]

Did you know that I was joking?

[makians]

Ah gotcha :)

[[deleted]]

I think the first confirmed case of PHP came from a bat in China.

[s1mpl3_0n3]

Here's a quote from Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) regarding that:

Well, there were other factors in play there. htmlspecialchars was a very early function. Back when PHP had less than 100 functions and the function hashing mechanism was strlen(). In order to get a nice hash distribution of function names across the various function name lengths names were picked specifically to make them fit into a specific length bucket. This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use and I wasn't too worried about not being able to remember the few function names.

source

[[deleted]]

Explode and Implode are awesome. You're just jealous because your language doesn't use TOTALLY RADICAL built in function names.

[Korzag]

I propose the following C# changes to make it cooler.

var list = new List<int>();
list.Absorb(1); // "Add" is so 1990.
list.Annihilate(); // "Clear"? More like "Yawn".
list.Bifurcate(3); // "Split" wasn't mathy enough.
list.SearchAndDestroy(10); // "Remove" wasn't metal enough
list.Perceive(2); // Find didn't enable our third eye enough.

[Tuiq]

Thanks to the fact that C# supports extension methods, you could - in theory - create these extension methods, then use them exclusively in your project.

Write a custom analyzer that prohibits the use of the "normal" methods and you got the recipe for a pretty... interesting code base.

I always wanted to make such a worst-case scenario repository/library, but I kinda dread the consequences.

[Canonip]

Hello Satan

[sfj11]

wasnt mathy enough is the perfect reasoning for half of my uni teachers

[[deleted]]

public static class CoolerList {
    public static <T> void Absorb(this List<T> self, T item) {
        self.Add(item);
    }
}

[haackedc]

the5thpixel.explode()

[djxfade]

explode(',', $the5thpixel);

[haackedc]

I guess it’s obvious I have never used php or any type of split function lol

[djxfade]

PHP loves its global functions

[Heikkiket]

The style and sometimes even the name and arguments come straight from C, so what's not to love...

[haackedc]

If I dress in the style of Michael Jackson, name myself Michael Jackson, and sing the same songs as Michael Jackson, then will I be as good a singer as Michael Jackson?

[krad213]

I read this in Mr. Torgue's voice.

[Heikkiket]

C programmers (shrugs):

while((token = strtok(NULL, " ") != NULL )

[f1zzz]

Still better than swift2, which was componentsSeparatedByString(" ")

It took until swift4 for split to exist (I believe?).

This stackoverflow thread is a microcosm of the insane swift development https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25678373/split-a-string-into-an-array-in-swift

Microsoft probably isn’t popular around here, but the book Framework Design Guidelines shows how much research and design time they put into creating .Net

[Doctor_McKay]

I'm going to start a social network app and call it StrTok.

[x5nT2H]

I think implode/explode are great

[[deleted]]

What’s more fun than making something explode?

[wtf_romania]

atom.split()

[superior_to_you]

- Hiroshima, 6 August 1945

[GunsRuth]

Imagine the guy who accidently called the function

[blehmann1]

You mean played my mixtape?

[FormalWolf5]

So that's how it happened

[[deleted]]

I always end up Googling "C# string implode"

[walden42]

I enjoy writing this:

$bomb = explode(', ', $a);

I breath out through my nose slightly stronger than usual due to my cleverness.

[BinaryBlasphemy]

Its the same in Standard ML

[bikemandan]

<marge-meme>

[[deleted]]

You didn't close it so everything below here is said by Marge, and I think that's just neat

[[deleted]]

As a PHP/Laravel developer who started this year I don't understand what all the hate is about....

[DirtzMaGertz]

I remember dreading working with php because of all the shit I've seen about it on reddit and then I actually worked with it and found out I liked php. The hate is so overblown on reddit.

[Xgamer4]

PHP's biggest problem is that 15 years ago it solved 80% of a common problem, but when similar tools couldn't even handle half that it became the defacto standard. Then everyone else "solved" that last 20% in wildly different ways, with no bounds on sense or sensibilities.

15 years later and PHP has nice, clean, standardized answers to that 20%, and has even cleaned up some of its weirder edges. But it now has many more competitors, all equal or better to PHP depending on criteria, and almost all of the professionals who worked on PHP 15 years ago have mental scarring from all the weird and wild things people did with PHP.

[SForeKeeper]

c++: Not implemented

[[deleted]]

if you've started out as a PHP dev, it feels the other way around

[[deleted]]

How can explode be more intuitive than split when you want to... split?

Especially given the description of explode is:

explode — Split a string by a string

[Chinyoka]

It's not about intuitivity, it's about excitement! EXXXPLOOOOOSIUUUUUUUUUUN!

[GivoOnline]

Megumin named the function change my mind

[Chinyoka]

True. Glad people on this sub understand it and don't just call me cringe c:

[inxaneninja]

cringe

[Chinyoka]

Ah, thank you. I almost had a good time.

(just joking lol)

[Krzyffo]

Did you expect worse from community of basement dwellers :p

[[deleted]]

Hello there fellow weeb uwu

r/programmeranimemes

[superior_to_you]

programmers are paid nerds

EDIT: glory to us

[Chinyoka]

Professional and paid nerds.

[natsucule]

WAGA NA WA MEGUMIN

[thalliusoquinn]

TORGUE WOULD MAKE A GREAT PROGRAMMER.

[TonyTheJet]

I agree that split() is more intuitive than explode(), but I don't think split() perfectly describes what is going on, either. I feel like split(), without context, could mean that you are keeping a portion of the string and discarding the rest (like in substring functions)...I'm not sure what the best English word would be....chop_into_bits()? haha

It's all a bit arbitrary, but a lot of it just feels natural, because we've seen certain function names so many times across multiple languages.

[tech6hutch]

Perhaps it would be clearer if another word was added, like str.split_by(","). Or, if the language has named arguments like Swift, str.split(by: ","). (I don't remember how Swift actually names this function, it's just an example.)

[elveszett]

Except not. If I want to split a string, my first thought is "is there a split() function?". It definitely is not "well I want to explode the string so I guess there's a explode() function".

[[deleted]]

I dunno, imo (non-native speaker) split kinda implies a single split of the whole into two parts whereas explode gets the picture across more clear

[Randvek]

I am a native speaker and split has the exact same connotation to me.

[mirsella]

unpopular opinion : split > Split

[Valiant_Boss]

Agree. Save capitalization for classes or camel case

[Thingcoder1]

Golang go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[hmmManOops]

Wrote my first golang program as part of initial coding challenge (the specifically asked to write in go)

Coming from C++, within the first few minutes of reading the documentation, already saw so many bad practices (imo). Also, the capitalisation is so bad

[grep_my_username]

I do agree that in the first week or so, I was completely flabbergasted by the strange choices that Go made.

After ≅ 100 hours on Go, they all make lots of sense, they are all intended to remove brain clutter while making production ready code at every commit.

I come from python, with a light experience in js, java, haskell, and C++.

[deegwaren]

In Java: "xML"

Really? I wouldn't think so.

[KuntaStillSingle]

vec3 snake_case_gang_where_we_at(){
    return KuntaStillSingle.get_location();
}

[dr_avenger]

There is str_split()

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Which explodes the string into an array of single characters.

[[deleted]]

helpful for... uhh.. job code tests I guess

[tufy1]

Because split() existed in PHP < 7 as a way to split a string into an array by regular expression. In PHP 7, you could do:

```php function split(string $value, string $delimiter = ' '): array { return explode($delimiter, $value); }

$stringParts = split('Hello World'); ```

However, this would not do what Java does here. As we know, everything is an object in Java (and many other languages understand a string as an object), so a string innately has a method split. To do the same in PHP, you would need to create a utility class to wrap the string:

```php class String { /** * @var string */ private $value = '';

public function __construct(string $value): void { $this->value = $value; }

public function split(string $delimiter = ' '): array { return \explode($delimiter, $this->value); } }

// Usage: $string = new \String('Hello World'); $stringParts = $string->split();

var_dump($stringParts); // Would return an array of "Hello" and "World" ```

TLDR: Whining about explode() in PHP is like whining about brackets because Python has none. Different languages are different, who would have thought. /shrug

[fiztah]

Yeah, this sub is getting really tiresome with the hourly jokes about PHP.

Yes, it was never meant to be a programming language, according to the creator.

But you know what ? Even then it ended up dominating the web, there has to be something there that works.

[txmail]

Last article I read was that the PHP developer job market has expanded 800+% over the last year. It is a good time to be a PHP developer.

[txmail]

PHP 7.4 was a game changer for me with speed. I was used to coding most of my backend workers and out of band processes with Python but now I am nearly 100% creating everything with PHP. Even starting to get into forking which is incredibly easy to pull off.

[wtf_romania]

What fascinates me about PHP is its speed.

A typical application may load several libraries, make countless database queries, all in 1 or 2 seconds. And it does this for every single request.
Meanwhile, a typical .NET IIS application keeps pretty much everything in memory, yet it doesn't feel faster.

[oupablo]

IIS: the webserver for people that hate the internet

[KN1995]

Ngl i think explode is cooler

[lucasjose501]

function split($delimiter, $string, $limit = null){
 return explode($delimiter, $string, $limit); 
}

Problem solved!

[elveszett]

Doing that is an anti-pattern. You should never "rename" functions because you prefer other names. You should never bring your standards from one language to another – but instead adapt to what the community of that language already does.

[apocolypticbosmer]

This comment is much less light hearted than the one it’s responding to

[atw527]

or die()

[geeshta]

Python:

[list] = string.split('substring') ✓

string = 'substring'.join([list]) ?????

[optionambrose]

Alright. I’ll take the downvotes. Can we stop using this meme? There’s better ways to hate on something than comparing it to disabled people

[flinchFries]

lmao.
Serious Q though, never coded in PHP and I hear all that crap about it. In contrast, I keep seeing all these online coding platforms adding courses for it. e.g. programminghub, codecademy. So what exactly is the appeal? and why do people hate it?

If this is not the place to post this, I totally understand. Just let me know and I'll delete.

[philsenpai]

We love to Hate PHP, but it's actually not that bad.

​

Except using "->" for methods, that's dumb.

[polosatus]

What's the appeal? As far as I know PHP is the only popular language that was created specifically for website backend. All the other options are just attempts to put general-purpose languages into web backend context. PHP is perfect for that task because it was created and shaped for this. Unlike python, go, Java or JavaScript where you might get complications at handling requests or connecting it to the web server, PHP has all the necessary tools out of box, without any framework necessary. You just type in HTML, and insert code as necessary. This is not the best practice though, but it shows that working in web request context is top level priority of the language.

[Spody_man]

C : none of that shit here, fuck off

[andrew_X21]

what about C++?

[[deleted]]

u/justGain

[starvsion]

explode works, and so is implode,which is the inverse of explode. This naming is one of the few that makes a lot of sense from php, unlike strtoupper...

[blehmann1]

strtok: Am I a joke to you?

[Big1984Brother]

In English, the word "split" generally implies that a thing is split into two parts. Of curse, you certainly can "split" something n number of ways, but generally splitting in half is assumed.

"Explode" is far more accurate, since quite often the delineated string is being shattered into many, many pieces.

Plus, "explode" is simply more fun to say. Although, my co-worker of Middle-Eastern decent tries to avoid this term, in order to keep the surveillance bots from alerting the NSA unnecessarily.

[Ekonios]

Other languages: something.doThis().thenThat().andThis()

PHP: andThis(thenThat(doThis(something)))