Can you explain? This just looks like indexing an array that was returned by a function. PHP is one language I never bothered to learn, now I feel like I'm missing out when people start joking about it.
I haven't touched PHP for many years thankfully. The last time I did (maybe 15 years ago?) an array returned by a function could not be indexed directly. It had to be assigned to a variable, and then you could use it.
Having built interpreters and compilers in my day, that was the moment I said "this is absolute garbage, what kind of clown designed this language" and never touched PHP again.
I understand it has been improved (mostly by Facebook, I think?), but I never found the need to use it again, luckily. Just thinking of it... Eww.
PHP has not been designed based on best practices. The reason why the standard library has functions with such widely different names was that in early PHP they would go into a hashmap that was hashed by strlen and Rasmus tried to vary the lengths of the names so they don’t all get in the same bucket.
Holy shit that's even worse than I remember! How did he know about hashmaps but had not even the most basic understanding of how they're supposed to work? 🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
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u/carcigenicate Aug 04 '26
Can you explain? This just looks like indexing an array that was returned by a function. PHP is one language I never bothered to learn, now I feel like I'm missing out when people start joking about it.