PHP's manual is also TRWTF
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PHP has many faults. One of them appears to be the community around its manual.
For what I'm doing, I'm messing around with potentially large downloads and looking around what my options are since it's not something I normally have to deal with.
So I'm looking up things like
readfile
when I see a 'chunked' version that does parsing of the HTTP Range header as an example. Said function is upvoted, but has a bug where it's using the wrong references in a preg_match test (against the range header itself)There is actually a correction to it, pointing out what's wrong and why it's wrong but that was curiously downvoted as unhelpful.
It's like StackOverflow in microcosm.
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You can up/down vote comments on the PHP manual now?
The comments section used to be a list of 5 years worth of postings of terrible code that was 1 of 3 things,
- broken code followed by 30 comments of people pointing out various bugs to fix to make it do what it said it would
- implementations of random one-off scenarios or trick usages that the posters felt were particularly comment-worthy, but probably should have been avoided altogether
- code to fix things that were broken within PHP itself or to wrap an old version of PHP's function up to match the current version's output
--some comments were all of the above.
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So the PHP community is even more dysfunctional than here? I didn't know that was possible.
Filed under: you learn something every day I guess
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You've been able to upvote and downvote for years.
But yes, there's an awful lot of that.
As for being dysfunctional, it really is no less or more dysfunctional than any slice of StackOverflow.
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You've been able to upvote and downvote for years.
Really? I think they've had a beta version of the manuals that you must have been visiting... I noticed that they changed the layout on me within about the last 1 month or so.
On the old layout the comments were all in order by comment date (I suppose it might have been possible to up/down vote them but it doesn't make much difference if they're sorted by date rather than vote count).
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Oh, no, the upvoting is not new at all.
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A long time ago, when I was just starting, I was known to dabble in PHP. Their manual was actually my favorite thing about the language. It's super clear, easy to navigate and with a lot of nice short examples you can copypasta into your own spaghetti. Compared to the labyrinthine Microsoft docs, it was heaven.
As long as you're doing super simple newbie things, that is.
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Oh yes. The manual is simultaneously the best and worst thing about it because it explains everything and has lots of helpful snippets but it never explains any of the 'you shouldn't really do this in production' stuff to you.
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Python's manual is really lacking.
"Let me tell you how to do this, but provide no examples whatsoever."
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Ruby's is a PITA
You could do that in the old version by using this code (that only works in the new)
(Alas, upgrading the Ruby on the production server in question is horribly non-trivial.)
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I'd imagine that it's easy. You just use the same code/upgrade script that you used to upgrade the dev, test, and mock-prod environments.
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No, it was freshly installed just last week. It's a very old Debian box (with seriously pleasing amounts of RAM, as it was originally specced as a production database server…)
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Again, the easiest way to upgrade is follow the same steps as upgrading dev. ..
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It's a very old Debian box
So...dependency issues (because your dev/test environments don't match production)? Political issues in scheduling downtime?
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it really is no less or more dysfunctional than any slice of StackOverflow.
It's probably due to my timezone, but StackOverflow, for me, is basically an endless barrage of Nageshes. Still, SO did work, once upon a time. The problem now being that all the common questions have answers, so the only questions getting asked now are either duplicates getting vote-to-closed in 15 seconds, or some arcane combination of technologies no-one outside the asker has ever tried to use together before. And the community just spends all their time on meta arguing about whether or not they're elitist.
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And we spend all our time in meta arguing too. I think Jeff just enables arguments.
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And the community just spends all their time on meta arguing about whether or not they're elitist.
That sounds like a job for metameta!
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And the community just spends all their time on meta arguing about whether or not they're elitist.
As if the answer wasn't obvious. SO's community is basically the Internet forum equivalent of a bureaucratic machine.
The problem now being that all the common questions have answers, so the only questions getting asked now are either duplicates getting vote-to-closed in 15 seconds, or some arcane combination of technologies no-one outside the asker has ever tried to use together before.
The problem is, most of SO's answering community is there just for the quick rep, and they don't necessarily have a lot of technical knowledge. So questions like "how do you for loop" get a barrage of answers, and the more technical ones tend to linger around at least until you add a bounty.
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And to think people tried to virtually stone me elsewhere for even daring to suggest that SO was not the pinnacle of achievement for technical Q&A.
Filed under: and these people hadn't even heard of Jeff
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And to think people tried to virtually stone me elsewhere for even daring to suggest that SO was not the pinnacle of achievement for technical Q&A.
In the land of the blind, etc.
Filed under: it's either that or expert gender-benders
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In the land of the blind, etc.
Filed under: it's either that or expert gender-benders
Indeed. Which is why I love coming here even with all my natural self-deprecation because here I'm not considered a borderline deity. Yes, there are people that actively look up to me for my l33t PHP skillz. And it's so refreshing not to be treated like that here ;)
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So...dependency issues (because your dev/test environments don't match production)? Political issues in scheduling downtime?
Political issues, I suppose. When we upgrade, we'll do it by ripping the whole thing out of the datacenter and replacing it with some heavy-duty-specified VMs, but I've not got the time to sort all of the shit out right now.
(It does have an up-to-date OpenJDK installed, but that's what it's main purpose is.)
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StackOverflow, for me, is basically an endless barrage of Nageshes
It's somewhat true, but it's also a function of which tags you follow. More specific tags tend to have a better SNR, but a lower question rate. If you have the reputation, vote up the good and down the bad, and close/flag/delete the dupes and the shit.
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That's not your idea of an enabler, or that was a meta argument joke?
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I think "enables" just doesn't capture the full nuance of Jeff-itude.
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It really doesn't do it justice.
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You're more of an 'Enabled, encourages, promotes, and advocates' kind of guy? I know @Arantor has a special level of salt towards Jeff that spills out weeks after he's wandered back to his own area.
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For myself, I usually roll those up into "troll."
I don't have the animus that @Arantor has, but I don't let that get in the way of a good post, and I always see 'em like I call 'em.
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Most of the reason I'm so pissed at Jeff is pure projection. He embodies everything I have come to despise in software development, especially open source development - and it's on my home turf, so to speak.
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It's probably due to my timezone, but StackOverflow, for me, is basically an endless barrage of Nageshes. Still, SO did work, once upon a time. The problem now being that all the common questions have answers, so the only questions getting asked now are either duplicates getting vote-to-closed in 15 seconds, or some arcane combination of technologies no-one outside the asker has ever tried to use together before. And the community just spends all their time on meta arguing about whether or not they're elitist.
The trick is to only go there when you need to. Don't live there.
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I've been hitting results on SO today for things, I'm convinced that either what I'm trying to do is impossible or that everyone on SO is a retard when it comes to PHP (since even most of the 'answers' marked are wrong for what I'm doing)
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Try Coding Help?
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Yes, I'll just answer my own question?
I did wonder but I think people would think I'm mad.
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Anything done using PHP can be considered wrong.
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Anything done using PHP can be considered wrong.
Yes, the last 11½ years of my life were largely a mistake, wouldn't argue with you there.
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Might as well post coding help to get the best wrong answer.
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I remember reading a comment on the
realpath
function that saidin PHP, there is no function that does the opposite.
I don't even
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mysql_real_fakepath_string
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Might as well post coding help to get the best wrong answer.
As it happens, I hit many random variously wrong answers on SO and one of the links actually pointed me in the right direction. But I wouldn't suggest that SO was helpful here, I would have found the thing I found eventually without SO.
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I remember reading a comment on the
realpath
function that said> in PHP, there is no function that does the opposite.
I don't even
That comment is still there, but voted to -1, and includes a 'get relative path' implementation.
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Why would you need that?!
In any case, although I really liked the "fractal of bad design" about PHP, I'll undoubtebly admit that it at least gets the shit done.
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Why would you need that?!
In any case, although I really liked the "fractal of bad design" about PHP, I'll undoubtebly admit that it at least gets the shit done.
I don't know, people are f'kin nuts.
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Hey! I know! It's an easy way to find the .htaccess file relative to which script you're using, and edit it on the fly!
php_ini
is for pussies.
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Except it wouldn't do that looking at the implementation. It really is about finding the path of one file relative to another when provided two absolute paths, except there is no reason I'm aware of to have relative paths since everything will accept absolute paths, and even fun things like open_basedir are good with that.
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Hey mate, are you seriously trying to code useful things these days? That is so 90s. Come on, we're rebuilding forums after rebuilding Q&A websites here!
Filed under: Next step is reinventing mail webclients. Hasn't been done since gmail, let's fund a kickstarter!
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Hey mate, are you seriously trying to code useful things these days? That is so 90s. Come on, we're rebuilding forums after rebuilding Q&A websites here!
Filed under: Next step is reinventing mail webclients. Hasn't been done since gmail, let's fund a kickstarter!
Oh, it's even better than that.
I'm seriously trying to code useful things these days IN PHP. <insert watch-out-we-got-a-badass-over-here meme>
And actually, there are already not-so-bad webmail clients for PHP, or at least used to be, I think Hordemail is still a thing.
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And to think people tried to virtually stone me elsewhere for even daring to suggest that SO was not the pinnacle of achievement for technical Q&A
That's the problem: it IS the pinnacle of achievement for coding Q&A on the internet. And it doesn't even come close to the old "pester everyone in the building until someone has an answer" heuristic.
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In which case we're all utterly fucked.
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That's the problem: it IS the pinnacle of achievement for coding Q&A on the internet. And it doesn't even come close to the old "pester everyone in the building until someone has an answer" heuristic.
The best of USENET was better, but the other 99.99% was awful.
Warning: this posting is copronumerological…