I was under the impression that some countries called their opposite-of-check a "giro".

Another way to do it, supported by both existing static languages such as C++ and existing dynamic languages such as Python, involves constructing objects using factory functions and then using the language's facility for making objects comparable. Comparison expressions might look like intval($a) > intval($b) or strtotime($a) > strtotime($b).

I read "check to see if the string is null or empty" as meaning "I don't care which". In practice, I've seen more uses for "I don't care which" than for distinguishing null from empty. In fact, a lot of cases call for not only treating null like the empty string but also disregarding leading and trailing spaces, and that's why I often end up using trim($some_string) in PHP or (some_string or '').strip() in Python.

Funding abortions with tax revenue likewise imposes pro-choice advocates' will on taxpayers. Thus it is ethically bankrupt to require employers to pay for abortifacient means of birth control if they already pay for other, non-abortifacient means. And as I understand it, Hobby Lobby was paying for condoms, diaphragms, the pill, the patch, vasectomies, and more.

I like to say "defecated" and see if anyone notices.

One employer has RHEL, and I'll make sure to tell him about Oracle's Yum repo for RHEL. The other has Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, whose support is due to end in about 9 months; I need to have my boss help plan an upgrade.

Please allow me to backpedal. There is a scientific concept involved, but I concede that it is philosophy to use that scientific concept as the deciding factor.

I haven't tried every dynamically typed language out there, but I have tried Python, and it doesn't share a lot of PHP's faults.

Python at least doesn't aggressively try to convert strings that look like numbers to numbers to compare them numerically.

Python adopted PEP 8 fairly early on.

Python allows each module to specify its own semantic versioning either with new syntax (such as with or new-style classes) or, when old syntax would get new semantics, with from __future__ statements.

Agreed.

And with returning false, you can handle failures even within a generator expression. In Python, statements can do things that expressions cannot, and one of these things is try. This means if you include a function call that may raise an exception in a generator expression, you need to make and name a separate function that tries the call and translates the exception to a sentinel value indicating that a particular call in the list failed. If you're using the warning-to-ErrorException snippet from PHP's manual, then @expression behaves as if there were an inline try/catch: exceptions when you want them, nulls when you don't.

I wasn't trying to change anyone's mind about PHP being broken. I was only trying to point out that not everybody agrees that PHP is as broken as "fractal" rant author believes it is.

I admit to having grouped similar points from "fractal" together to make the strongest half dozen talking points.

How does the presence of "C and Python crash fatally, potentially destroying the memory space of other programs. Got it." invalidate the whole rebuttal? Even if it isn't sarcasm, when programs hit undefined behavior, they can scribble on other programs running in the same process space, such as if your web app is loaded as a module instead of a CGI program. Granted, this is harder to do in Python without using native code interfaces like ctypes.

If only the distro on my server at work had 5.6...

I didn't mean 4; I meant 5.2. PHP 5.3 was a substantial improvement, but it took quite a while after its release for shared hosts to catch up.

True, InnoDB has been around since I've been using MySQL. But MySQL still doesn't support transactions and full-text search on the same table unless you write your own indexer.

Not all implicit conversions introduce problems. Casting to a Boolean type, as the if statement does, is fine with the caveat that which values are considered "truthy" or "falsey" depends on the language. For example, PHP's ordinary bool cast rules are pretty much the same as Python's, except that the string "0" is falsey in PHP but truthy in Python. C and Java have their own definition: a nonzero primitive or a nonnull pointer is truthy. I find these implicit conversions, as well as some language-specific rule for implicit conversion to the language's string type, to make sense in general.

The practical problem with how PHP handles comparisons comes when it performs implicit conversions that make little sense. Strings more often than not end up converted to numbers before they're compared.

You are correct that a lot of people do not. For one thing, they may lack the money to lease both a testing environment and a production environment from the hosting provider. Or they may lack access to server logs because the hosting provider doesn't provide server logs to customers on plans below the VPS tier.

Autoload failures caused fatal errors until 5.3, and some hosting providers were still on 5.2 after 5.4 came out.

True. But there are several cases in Python where the interpreter implements both sets of semantics and allows each source code file to select one or the other. Some, such as the division semantics, use the from __future__ statement; others, such as the parallel "classic classes" and "new classes" in the 2.x series, use other syntactic triggers. And unlike Python, where the initial #!/usr/bin/env line selects the interpreter version, the choice of PHP version depends on a server configuration that's often out of the hosting subscriber's control.

Thin wrappers are better when they're namespaced. Namespaces allow providing both traditional names and PEP 8-compliant names without overly polluting the global namespace.