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How would I change PHP?

September 22nd, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

Anyone who knows me knows I am a PHP fanboy. I use PHP for everything - web applications, web scraping, batch scripting, if there is an itch that software can fix, I try to scratch it with PHP. I dreamed of a PHP scripting plugin for Eggdrop IRC bots, so I didn't have to fuss with TCL. Anywhere PHP could be adopted, I've hoped someone was working on a way it could be.

However, if you talk to people who know the internals of PHP they'll tell you there's a lot of ugly stuff in there. That it's a language based on macros, etc. I don't necessarily care about that. My experience is from a user perspective, not an internals one. That being said, just from my higher level interaction with the language, these are some of the things I'd love to change.

  • Make function name conventions consistent. Some functions have underscores, some don't. strpos vs. str_replace, html_entity_decode vs. htmlentities, etc.
  • Make argument order consistent for similar types of functions. Depending on what you're doing, it's one or the other. in_array($needle, $haystack) vs. strstr($haystack, $needle), etc.
  • Optimize the core. Strip the core down more, and push more things into modules. Enable some of them by default, fine. But when it comes down to it, I don't need easily 30-40% of the functions that PHP has built in.
  • Combine similar functions and use arguments to define the behavior. For example addslashes() and addcslashes(). Make it one function with a constant to define its behavior.
  • Disable magic quotes (preferred) or enable it and don't give any option to change it. As far as I'm concerned as long as you pick one route, you can guarantee universal compatibility, whether that means using magic quotes, or not using them and expecting developers to understand input sanitization, sanity checking/type checking/all that jazz. Which I don't think is a bad thing.
  • Implement a "strict" mode. "PHP is lazy" as Rasmus says which is fine and all, but I don't like the PHP name shamed with terms like "insecure" - any code can be insecure in any language, however, PHP is so easy to pick up and get things going that it makes it too easy to write crappy and insecure code. Specifics on a "strict mode"? I've got none. It's late and I can't think of how I would enforce better coding practices in core...
  • Get rid of $_REQUEST. I've advocated this for years and even unset($_REQUEST) in my code. To me it's a lazy person's workaround for coding and introduces some of the same vectors that were closed when disabling register_globals. If you -really- want to have a $_REQUEST type mechanism in your code, just array_merge($_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE, etc) in whatever oder you want. I dislike using software that uses $_REQUEST by default but doesn't actually need the flexibility of POST vs. GET vs. COOKIE and such. Know which input stream your data is coming from, if nothing else, it will at least make replay attacks and such much harder for people to craft.
  • Get rid of objects and OO stuff. Yeah, I said it. Everyone loves OOP. Why? While I see the power of being able to extend classes, I also see it seeming to be the most troublesome when it comes to compatibility checks, all the APC crashing or odd bugs I've suffered from were due to it. If you look at something like Drupal, they've figured out how to extend or override using procedural code quite well. Sadly, even they're converting more things to OO as well.  IMO, OOP is more suited for longer-running applications, perhaps something event driven where a new object to represent a connection is created (however, C's been doing this without dealing with objects forever, it doesn't HAVE to be OO...) Those are the two main examples I see for using OO. Disclaimer: I wasn't raised in an OO environment, this is all based on personal experience and preference. 🙂

I've memorized the function list for what I use pretty well (like I said, I probably only use a subset of the functions in PHP) however the most annoying thing is when it comes to the needle vs. haystack argument positioning. I usually have to reference php.net for it. Sometimes I can trial and error though. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have to.

It would be great if something like PHP 6.0 would adopt some of these practices, since it is a major version change. Perl, Ruby and Python I believe have all done similar things where a major change really was a dramatic change and required conversion of code to meet its new requirements.

I'm sure this list could grow, and I may add to it. Who knows.

Categories: Development, PHP
  1. mike
    September 22nd, 2010 at 14:51 | #1

    Oh. No more white screen of death either. Give me *something* other than that.

  2. raveren
    October 17th, 2010 at 10:42 | #2

    You will one day return to this article and laugh at how naive and amateurish you were.

  3. mike
    October 17th, 2010 at 15:26 | #3

    @raveren
    I'm considering you a troll, unless you have specific reasons for that comment.

    Half of these align with things other experts have discussed in the past. The only one that is my personal opinion is ditching OOP.

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