• experbia@kbin.social
    19·
    1 year ago

    I’ve made a point to learn and understand commonly “mocked” languages. The reasons they’re ridiculed for are often very tightly related to the reasons why they’re powerful in unique ways.

    It’s hard to defend some parts of PHP, but it doesn’t deserve the hatred it gets. Its standard library is a self-contradictory mess, yes. But it’s backwards-compatible with previous language versions to a fairly remarkable degree. This backwards-compatability might seem strange now, but not that long ago, this guarantee meant it could evolve very rapidly as a language and ecosystem without risking losing users to a continual barrage of updates necessary to keep atop of, lest your application fail. I think this is the reason it overtook PERL as the first major “server-side” dynamic website language of choice.

    It has that goofy dollar sign variable syntax, yes. I personally think a special syntax for variable access vs function calls is one of the reasons coding beginners found it slightly easier to use - you didn’t need to keep so much track of name collisions and stuff. $thing is always a piece of data, a noun. thing is always a keyword or function, a verb. You can thing($thing), it’s OK, they’re different. You’re verbing a noun.

    It could grow fast and be picked up quick, so it’s no wonder to me it persists, ever-improving, in the midst of all these extremely popular, extremely modern languages in use today. Wikipedia, Facebook, WordPress, Slack, Etsy, indeed even kbin, the piece of Fediverse software I’m writing this on now.

  • TeaHands@lemmy.world
    171·
    1 year ago

    Having worked with all kinds of languages, I stand by my belief that PHP is the most fun.

    Yeah maybe it lets you do some things it probably shouldn’t. Yeah maybe the naming conventions are wild. But it also encourages creativity and experimentation in a way that stricter languages just don’t.

    Yes I am willing to die on this hill.

  • deaf_fish@lemm.ee
    9·
    1 year ago

    I don’t get the top square. I thought PHP was for generating HTML, not for creating EXEs.

  • alokir@lemmy.world
    8·
    1 year ago

    One of your dependencies are broken, you probably never installed them in the first place or tinkered with the node_modules folder, which you really shouldn’t do.

    I looked at index.ts in the package api-ai-javascript and it’s there. Just run npm install and try again.

      • alokir@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        It took a few seconds to read them and about a minute to search for the package on npm, another minute to come back to Lemmy and type out my comment.

        All in all, not the worst case of me wasting my time.

  • PeWu@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 year ago

    Hell yeah brother. All hail JS, even if it’s trash. But at least it’s my trash