Putting this here as it's not relevant to the thread it started in. @evagoras I reckon in PHP if it didn't need the

$

on variable names, used

.

instead of

->

, I'd be pretty happy with it, syntactically.

it really ought to return wddx by default tho

don't you start, Spitzer.

@Adam Cameron aren't those enough? 🙂 Multiple native functions that do the same thing, or newer native functions that are supposed to do the same thing but don't, like

serialize

and

json_encode

or

isset

and

empty

. Then there's the stuff that cfml also struggles with so I can't complain too much, but still annoy me. Like inconsistent passing by reference or value, utf-8 internalization, inconsistent use of arguments in native functions like some go

needle, haystack

and some the other way around. I am sure I can come up with some others if I think through it.

Ah yeah a lot of the shit that went into the language prior to... 5.5?... is "a bit" of a mess

It's really hard to prune a long-standing language without making enemies of the people/apps/extensions that use the messy bits you want to lop off.

Backwards compatibility is a serious issue, especially for enterprise customers like Adobe's. I get it. You can't just drop in with a parachute on your existing clients on the next release train, it needs to happen incrementally. As a programmer though I just wish everyone (php, adobe, lucee, others) moved faster and dropped old implementations in favour of the newer ones.

Yeah but it also helps to be intelligent with what you put into the language in the first place, too. I mean look at all this stuff: https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.array.php There's just not a need for most of those to ever have existed.

yeah there was a lot of that, probably somebody going "check this out, I added a new C wrapper" without much thought to the platform, which is understandable for a growing language.

One benefit of CFML being controlled by mothership. And - IMO - this is demonstrated by some of Lucee's decisions where they don't just stick with Adobe's decisions.

Yeah those array functions are exactly the kind of cruft that made me not explore PHP much. Pfft.

I like that ... (ahem) ... younger developers explore 'server-side rendering'. Front-end nonsense scripts which include html/css inside JS 'components' now include SQL - yes, SQL - inside JS code. But running on server to produce HTML. We need to show JS people beauty of PHP templates or CFML custom tags...