I’ve studied Ruby for 2 weeks. After my hair became green, I moved back to PHP. IMHO Ruby sucks.

Is it possible to read a file over web in Ruby?

But I think in your example the Ruby code is cleaner AND shorter :)

Or state it another way:

“clean” reduces the headache to understand the code
“short” reduces the boredom to understand the code

and when the two conflict, choose “clean” first, because boredom is better than headache :)

I for did not claim that shorter is better. That’s not an absolute. But the claim has some merit to it, because simpler is better, and shorter is often simpler.

In your samples, the ruby version is hands down simpler. It’s not that the PHP version is longer, it is the fact that it includes script code in string literal, passed to a function which parses and executes a function?

The ruby version simple makes use of the built-in map algorithm. No extra parsing. To the point. And yes, shorter.

I’ve never programmed in ruby, but I do have experience with a lot of other languages. I don’t need to know every detail of ruby to recognize it a a very clean language (although I generally dislikes weakly typed/dynamically typed languages).

I guess so. The Ruby code is shorter and cleaner, and that’s the point of what I consider “good code”. :)

Fenrir2 gave this as a code example for why he dislikes PHP.


$array = array(1, 2, 3);
$ret = array();

foreach($array as $n)
{
$ret[] = $n * 2;
}

return $ret;


If you want a single line you could do this…


array_walk($n = array(1, 2, 3), create_function('&$elem',$elem *= 2;'));


It’s definately easier to understand than his prefered example of


[1, 2, 3].map{|n| n * 2}


:)

I programmed in PHP more than five years and I can say that the PHP built-in functions are far less practical and useful than the Ruby built-in features (blocks, mixins, modules and a long etc.)

And, of course, things like file_get_contents don’t make PHP to be better than any other language… Harry, Can you do better to demonstrate me that PHP is better than Ruby?

domain specific languages anyone? Ruby is very good for creating domain specific languages as opposed to PHP.

You don’t understand, closures can introduce bugs unless you know what you are doing. Using JavaScript as an example.

A simple way to fix scope issue is this hack.
var _this = this;
var func = function() {_this.function()}


I see no difference from


function func1()
{
var func2 = function() { return 'test'; }
return func2;
}



class func1
{
public function __construct()
{
return 'test';
}
}


That fact that you start classes with the function doesn’t help matters.

An closure in PHP

class Test
{
public function __construct()
{
return $this->testString();
}

private function testString()
{
return 'test';
}
}


Being able to return functions means nothing at all.

These are the result of Poor Programming Practices and not bad programming languages:

Naming Conventions
Bad Namings

“Wishy-Washy OO Support” is just what you tell your friends, but I don’t think anyone else buys it. PHP 5 should fix all of your troubles with PHP OO. However, I do wish it was optimized better, but PHP is not Java.

I don’t know people are arguing over closures. In PHP 5 you can have use the Factory class model, which I think is the same thing and much better.

Doing some JavaScript over the past week has left me feeling happy about JavaScript function closures. However, while it is easy to understand, I don’t see it as any different from the Factory model, just different name.

What is annoying however in JavaScript is the this scope forcing you to use function closures. I think PHP is great that you don’t NEED closures, I can create closures in PHP and call it a hack all you want, but a closure is a closure no matter the syntax.

Writing a function inside a function I think leads to bad code. Write a class and just make the function private and return it. Be done with it.

What PHP 5 did that is also great is Reflection and I don’t know Ruby or Python to know if they also have this feature. What is nice about it is that it is easy (if however limited it is at this point) and straightforward. Look at it to see how PHP is moving forward and behold the power of PHP 5.

I do recall an article or blog post saying that it is pointless to compare languages as being better than the other. This is true. Your choice of Programming language is your own and saying it is better because of this and this feature to convice someone else isn’t going to work because they would have another feature that they love about their language.

Another way to look at it, it is like saying English is better than some other language because of its character base.

Ruturaj K. Vartak Says:

file_get_contents is still overlooked, just consider what file_get_contents can do..

* Read over File System
* Read over web
* Read over SSL
* Unzip gziped streams directly..

and probably more..

It can read anything you imagine. Just write a stream wrapper, register it with a name (say, mywrapper) and you can happily file_get_contents('mywrapper://...') for the rest of your life.

TheLunchBox Says:

I think a lot of people are missing the point of this. I believe what Harry is trying to point out is that most of the functionality programmers need is well named and works as you expect.

Yeah, you are returning to the most used pro-PHP quote: “It just works”. PHP is robust, fast, it works; all of the functions you need are already there. It’s stable and easy to deploy; it is well-known and established among (web) programmers.

But to me there is more to a good language than “it just works”. There are naming standards, syntactic sugar, language constructs, code beauty. PHP5 is making code beautiful again by putting things into classes, by providing common database access (PDO), by use of magic methods in objects and exceptions, and so on. But where is your PHP5 adoption? Large majority doesn’t use it – PHP4 “just works” for everybody. “Just works” being spaghetti code, no separation or reusability, hard maintainance, mysql_query and bunches of globals or constants sprinkled everywhere… and so on.

PHP spoiled people – it’s time to get them in shape. It will be a hard process… I just hope Zend Framework or ezComponents save PHP.

I think SitePoint should improve the code block … it sucks :(

I don’t know why the code doesn’t show up in the last post. Paste it again here:

interface Executable {
    function execute();
}
class ShowForm implements Executable {
    function execute() {
        @list($p1,$p2)   = func_get_args();
        echo __CLASS__.' executed: '.$p1.$p2;
        return 'called';
    }
}
class ApplyNonExecutableFunctionObjectExecption extends Exception {}
function apply($func) {
    $para   = func_get_args();  # get args
    array_shift($para);         # remove the func name
    # apply the func with the remain args
    if ($func instanceof Executable)
        return call_user_func_array(array($func,'execute'),$para);
    else
        throw new ApplyNonExecutableFunctionObjectExecption;
}
$rs = apply(new ShowForm,'hello','world');

Hope it works :(

you can actually go back from .NET to PHP and feel good? :)

can not pass functions as arguments …

You don’t have closures, but you most certainly can pass functions as arguments.

function foo($bar)
{
   $bar('called from foo');
}
function doSomething($foo)
{
echo $foo;
}
foo('doSomething');

Not having closures is annoying, but, well, most programmers don’t really understand closures anyway. As much as I love functional languages, getting other people to really understand them is difficult unless you’re lucky enough to only work with really intelligent people.

Or, you use ASP.NET and write your own functions and create you own objects in an ordered managed environment.

file_get_contents is still overlooked, just consider what file_get_contents can do..

* Read over File System
* Read over web
* Read over SSL
* Unzip gziped streams directly..

and probably more..

another angle on why this is less significant (compared to other issues PHP has)

I guess it depends on what your personal situation is. You complain of the difficulty in writing PHP that has to be distributed to servers running different PHP versions, or running different configurations. If you are the type that writes code that has to be distributed that way, I can see why the lack of namespaces would be just a minor irritant comparatively. However, for quite a lot of us in “the enterprise” (sorry to bring that term into the discussion) we are in complete control of the version of PHP and the configuration on all the servers we are concerned with deploying on, so other issues (like the no-namespaces issue) becomes more of a thorn in the side.

—by way of dubious analogy—consider Wikipedia: they’re using a single namespace for all documents and have considerably more documents than PHP has functions.

What makes a good system for naming Wiki documents and what makes a good system for referring to global symbols within program code are not the same. Namespacing is all about avoiding name collisions when you have a set of names that may (usually will) have to be combined with an as-yet-unknown other set of names. Is this an issue that Wikipedia has to deal with on a regular basis? Do they often merge their huge database of wiki pages with other wikis? I think not. A new article has to be created, so someone creates it, and if they’ve chosen a name that is already in use then they simply choose another. No big deal.

Program code is different. Naming collisions are a very real problem once you have to combine a non-trivial amount of code with another non-trivial amount of code. If you have a collision you get to choose one of the colliding symbols and give it a new name, which forces you to update all references to it. If you only have a few files and a few hundred lines of code, this is no big deal. If you have code numbering in the tens of thousands of lines, it becomes more irritating. Especially when working in a language that lacks automatic refactoring tools. (Yes, I know about grep, awk, sed, etc. …) And if the code you are integrating doesn’t exist in a vacuum (i.e. other projects depend on it) then this irritation can increase exponentially.

Back to your Wiki analogy… Let’s suppose that large wiki’s did frequently merge with each other. Imagine the case where a wiki page in one system has hundreds of references to it sprinkled throughout, and the same-named page in the other system similarly has hundreds of references to it, and they now have to be integrated? If this was a common need then I suspect wiki’s would develop a namespacing system very quickly.

Of course, namespace collisions can be avoided in PHP by giving all of your class names Long_And_Cumbersome_Prefixes, but that just trades one irritation for another. Now you have excessively long identifiers all over the place, which is an impediment to both reading and writing the code.

The point being, managing all those functions or conflicts with user defined functions are not really problems PHP has. … I say this because this problem gets quoted often is a major PHP problem.

I’ll admit that the lack of namespaces for functions isn’t really much of a practical problem, although it may make it more difficult for some newcomers to intuit the name or location of a desired function (for example, in Java if you need to know how to lowercase a string, you can guess that it’s probably a method of the String object), and it most certainly offends aesthetically. However, the lack of namespaces for classes is a very real problem that many people have with PHP and this is why it is so often quoted. If I never see another class named something like “PHPUnit2_Extensions_MockObject_Builder_InvocationMocker” it will be too soon.

Another reason to hate PHP: (just recalled from memory)

array syntax

$a = array(’foo’,’bar’,’foo bar’);

vs

$a = [’foo’,'bar’,'foo bar];

this is personal preference and has nothing to do with readabilty or ease of coding. harry demonestrated that what other languages do in kinda long unfriendly was was achieved with 1 easy line with PHP and I am sure that Harry isn’t implying that PHP is flawless, right Harry? ;)

Another reason to hate PHP: (just recalled from memory)

array syntax

$a = array('foo','bar','foo bar');

vs

$a = ['foo','bar','foo bar];

personally, I think array is the most powerful thing in PHP. but it has a really stupid syntax. array(array(array(…))) :(

This is a worst pro-PHP reason I’ve ever seen. One could write a followup “Reason to like Ruby” and compare foreach loops from other languages vs. iterators. And this could go on and on for every language…

Want file_put_contents in your language? Write it. You won’t notice the speed difference as opposed to built-ins because it’s a one liner in almost any interpreted language.

PHP’s huge library of built-in functions is definitely a strong point for the language.

And the fact that they’re all in one flat global namespace is definitely a weak point for the language. ;)

I agree. I do find myself wishing for PHP’s file_put_contents method while in other languages.

But, just to have a little fun with Ruby:

class String
  def write_to_file(path)
    File.open(path, 'w+') { |f| f.puts self }
  end
end
'Hello World!'.write_to_file('hello')

file_put_contents (and also file_get_contents) are absolute live savers. As long as the files to write or read aren’t too large, they’re great functions. And I find the PHP version of the above scripts to be the most… easily readable. Then again, I’ve not done much work in Perl or Ruby, so I’m probably a little biased!