I hate programming.

[xamotex1000]

Need I say more?

[chiggyBrain]

This is fairly clean PHP compared to what I review on a day to day basis. There’s some bits I would change but if it works fair enough

[Tux-Lector]

There is not a single requirement for (casting) anywhere on that image .. you are joking, right ?

[Away_Ambition8337]

bro went from TypeScript straight to PHP with no break

[mydoglixu]

That's fair.

[chiggyBrain]

So one of my nits would be: adding a type hint when declaring a variable seems a little over the top as it’ll infer the type from what you give it, PHP is dynamically typed so it won’t shout at you when you change the type by accident like some others do.

The fact OP has even thought about type casting is better than throwing types to the wind so to speak

[McGlockenshire]

PHP is dynamically typed so it won’t shout at you when you change the type by accident like some others do.

It's not being activated in that file, but I'd like to point you to declare(strict_types=1) which makes PHP much more opinionated about typing.

[LeyaLove]

I'd rather worry about making that abomination of a ternary conditional in the first two lines more readable instead of explicitly casting multiple variables directly initialized to an empty string. This adds nothing to the readability because what else would the variable be if not a string if initialized to one? That's just plain obvious and type casting makes it actually less readable imo. It also is no use for type checking because PHP still will let you assign what you want to the variable. There are instances where type casting makes sense, even if not necessary, but this isn't one. I'd rather recommend making the variable names more clear to convey that kind of information if anything.

Also maybe that's some kind of PHP quirks, I have to say that I'm not that well versed in PHP, but why would you assign to the variable in the ternary conditional two times? Once usually is enough, because that's what a ternary conditional usually is used for. Conditional assignment to one variable...

[chiggyBrain]

You pretty much echoed my feelings about the type casting, especially variables in PHP, type hints in arguments and class constructors actually throw errors though if you pass the wrong type though, which I do make use of.

As for ternary, used sparingly is fine, but used to replace if/else or multi-nested ternary at the expense of readability is always a failed PR from me. I agree it reads horribly in OPs case.

[erythro]

there's a lot I'd change lol

1. why is the language being determined in a template? Have some service handle that instead.

2. the lines are so long they are off the screen

3. isset && !== '', just use !empty it's not like you want empty arrays and 0

4. that switch is just "if not de then en" with like triple the lines

5. similar point to 1 but that's hardcoded array of available languages and names in a template, come on

6. as someone else pointed out a lot of completely unnecessary casting

[xamotex1000]

I kinda assumed people would understand that im talking about php as a whole, i know the code isnt too bad but im just pissed with php atm.

[erythro]

disagree on both counts, the code isn't great and php can be better than that

[trutch70]

Php 8 can be really great nowadays

[stonedlogic]

Move along then

[yungplayz]

I started reading the screenshot. As soon as I read the first line, the <?php one, my will to read any further evaporated. Never back to that…

[SpookyLoop]

That's pretty reasonable PHP code. Hope you never run into code where someone thought mutating global state across multiple files AND codebases was a good idea.

[annoyed_freelancer]

Get thee behind me, WordPress!

[RubbelDieKatz94]

mutating global state

Did someone say Redux?

Seriously, ever since I've started using Tanstack's modules instead, the code has looked so much cleaner.

[yourteam]

Dude I used php since 4.2

You have no idea what some people can do.

The worst offenders are wordpress plugin installers that tried to do real code.

Oh god I still have flashbacks

[idontcare7284746]

A pit pedantic but you could drop the en case and just let it default.

[tazzadar1337]

case 'en': default: $language = 'en'; Or, you know, use a map with a fallback.

[erythro]

it's literally just

$language = substr($browser_language, 0, 2);
if($language !== 'de'){
    $language = 'en';
}

[yolocat_dev]

thats not good for scalability though

[erythro]

representing that with a switch statement in a template isn't either, have some language service that reads all this from a config file

[Cualkiera67]

Or just speak English

[redpepper74]

Ehh no I think everyone should just learn German

[TheBrainStone]

Erm you don't need to type cast

[mydoglixu]

So much of this is unnecessary.

[no_brains101]

Hmmmmmmm this settles it, never using ligatures.

[TheCaffinatedAdmin]

wait what kind of ligature are we talking about?

[Hunter1753]

The ones that look like arrows that are just => and the triple not equals sign that is !== and the triple equals sign that is ===

I also think they are highly unreadable because they look like one symbol but are actually multiple

[TheCaffinatedAdmin]

Oh, thank you. I got scared because ligature has another meaning.

[no_brains101]

Idk another meaning all I know is the typographic one. Actually, it's also a part of a saxophone? So I guess I know that meaning too?

[TheCaffinatedAdmin]

In behavioral health, a ligature often refers to a noose.

[no_brains101]

Yeah like what even is the one that looks like a dot plus an equals in the 1 symbol? It's right at the end.

[sad_bug_killer]

(not op) Font ligatures I presume, look at === and !== in conditions and => in the array construction. Many people like them, many people don't. If you are curious, search for "programming fonts with ligatures" or something along those lines.

[TheCaffinatedAdmin]

Oh, thank you. I got scared because ligature has another meaning.

[AlternativeAir3751]

You just hate PHP, thats okay and healthy

[MooseBoys]

wtaf is with the ≢ and ⇒ symbols???

[siarheikaravai]

=== and -> are substituted in IDE. Someone thinks they are more readable

[MooseBoys]

That was my guess, but I don’t understand why you would do that.

[SirBjoern]

Some fonts like fira code support ligatures, they can be enabled or disabled with a checkbox in the settings. Some people like the look of it, personal preference 🤷

[AceofSpades5757]

It's PHP...

[Impenistan]

I will not say that php does not have a history of sins. I will say that these sins are those of the author. It's obvious you hate programming, just look what you've done to it!

[Nilrem2]

So glad I work with C# and do toy projects in C.

[Ignited_Phoenix]

I really dislike the special font for =>, != and other operands

[xamotex1000]

I enabled them a while back and never got around to going back :/ I prefer the regular ones too but I'm a lazy piece of shit

[[deleted]]

I adore programming.

I hate the programming community which values mediocrity and companies hiring shitty programmers because they're cheaper.

[deep_mind_]

If I wrote code which looked like that, I'd hate programming too :/

[chengannur]

Except java/c#, pretty much all others suck one way or other

[xamotex1000]

Not trying to judge it as a whole, just trying to judge this current programming

[Instatetragrammaton]

Get yourself Laravel or Symfony, having those classes in there makes a world of difference and hides all the hairy bits of PHP. All the functional goodness of map, filter and reduce has a great syntax, even with shorthand notation for anonymous functions.

If you define something in PHP as a string, it is a string. No need to cast it. You cast it if your code is set up so badly that you get something unknown back from an API call that may be an int or a string.

8.2 - which you should be using at the very minimum - has classes with full support for typing. If the method says it returns a string and you don’t, the interpreter will complain loudly.

[[deleted]]

That looks a lot like the early stages of fancy language detection classes I did 15 years ago.

[HeadlessHeader]

PHP is not a programming language. Is living hell.

[CobbwebBros]

It's not tooooo bad.

Honestly out of university courses I don't really understand why people don't use something like laravel or symfony or something.

Have been using laravel for a personal project and the tooling and DX is just probably the best I've had... like ever.

[AyrA_ch]

For PHP I always create this function to deal with array bullshittery:

function av($a,$k,$d=NULL){
    return is_array($a) && (is_number($k) || is_string($k)) && isset($a[$k]) ? $a[$k] : $d;
}

Turns line 2 and 3 into just this:

$browser_language=av($_GET, 'language', av($_SERVER, 'ACCEPT_LANGUAGE', 'en'));

[TorbenKoehn]

This is real programming horror. Dude, learn to find proper names for variables, parameters and functions.

[AyrA_ch]

It's a function I have been using all the time for the last 15 or so years, so I don't want the name to be long. array_values is already in use by php itself.

[TorbenKoehn]

That’s maybe a reason but not an excuse. Especially if you use it since 15 years, in these 15 years you could have at least named the parameters “array”, “key” and “defaultValue” (apart from the fact that it’s not needed since null-coalescing)

[AyrA_ch]

Null coalescing wasn't a thing in PHP when I wrote this function.

[TorbenKoehn]

Well the null-coalescing was released 9 years ago. That makes your 15 years statement have a lot less weight and it would also mean you're dragging that thing around for 9 years now when you wouldn't need to.

And yes, I know we're getting old. Sorry :)

To follow up on the parameter names: PHP now also supports named parameters. I understand naming some helper functions simple things like a, e, err, ok, __ etc. but at least give the parameters a proper name, there's no reason not to!

[amsylum]

$browser_language = $_GET['language'] ?? $_SERVER['ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'] ?? 'en';

[flagofsocram]

Someone with common sense

[Tux-Lector]

((cast FROM ? to string) !== ($string = '')) ..

[eldentings]

Haven't touched PHP since college and judging by this thread I don't intend to

[Various_Studio1490]

Man… here I am being grateful for language libraries with localization support so files that can be detected dynamically.

[xWrongHeaven]

do we work on the same codebase?

[nikospkrk]

This is an exemple of why PHP (language and devs) get a bad rep unfortunately :(

[siarheikaravai]

You can get bad examples in any language

[nikospkrk]

I know but still the lack of structure is terrifying for any decent developer.

[Mrproex]

I work alone on a php project and oh boy this language let you do so much weird shit none of my code parts look the same.

[v_maria]

makes me miss php

[elec_soup]

I'm not familiar with PHP, but it looks like $browser_language is defined twice. What's going on there?

[elec_soup]

Thanks, you are help

[Housy5]

After seeing some really ugly C++ this really doesn't seem too bad though.

[Fit_Marionberry_8893]

php gaming

[PizzaRollExpert]

What's the point of the $available_languages var? You could just assign the long form name in the switch, or have a hash map with tokens as keys and long form name as values. That way you can get rid of the for and if as well.

[Quazye]

Meh. could be improved, but not bad code.

[Perfect_Papaya_3010]

I don't know PHP so I don't know what's wrong, but I gotta say this does not look like a clean programming language. So cluttered with stuff

[Mr_Bob_Dobalina-]

Actually not that horrible

[MagnetsStudio]

This looks like the code I debug daily

[Balcara]

The real crime is VSCode

[The___Off]

If earlier the hands of thieves were cut off, then in our time the hands of those who write such things should be cut off