I think I mentioned earlier how I almost started writing a website in C and quickly realised that wasn’t the right tool for the job, and switched entirely to PHP.

For the work I did today I needed a good set of data structures:

• A set of files
  • Each with a set of english strings
    • Each with a set of 0 or more translations

Pice of cake, right? Right, it would have taken me a half an hour in C, took me over six hours in PHP.

One of the problems was a surprise in scoping. Turns out in PHP there is no such thing as block scoping, and they forgot to mention that in the manual (isn’t it obvious there’s only per function and per file scope?). This created some very weird bugs that took a lot of printing to figoure out.

Then there’s the arrays. How can you have a programming language without 0-indexed arrays? PHP forces you to manage the indicees yourself, since their ‘array’ is actually a hash table. No vector either, not list, basically only a hash table. Can get used to it I guess but was it really so hard to have something more structured?

Then there are the classes. I needed to use them because there is no concept of a struct and the arrays are so retarded. I won’t go too much into it, let me just say that I suspect classes in PHP resemble classes in Perl. Sure you can have them, but don’t expect them to be easy to use.

All this complaining, you say, but didn’t it take you years to learn how things work in C, what’s the problem with taking the time to learn how things work in PHP? Well – I would accept that if it weren’t for the prevailing opinion that PHP is easy to learn. It isn’t: you can get started using it very quickly but its similarities to C in syntax make it harder (not easier) to learn it well.

And yeah, the same applies to JavaScript, but whatever. That’s for when I’m ready to do something with this same data I mentioned above in the browser. Gonna be fun :)