To be fair: If you are chaining ternary expressions, you deserve to suffer whatever pain the language happens to inflict upon you tenfold.
Why?
It’s perfectly readable.
It is sort of readable. A switch is “perfectly” readable for switching.
Ternary expressions aren’t switches though
Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be using them in a situation that clearly calls for a switch.
Hating on php is one of the reasons i left reddit. This is just people who don’t use php hating php for some reason. You can do dumb examples like this for any language. Low effort and funny for children.
Your feelings are valid. I wonder though, would you put up this level of defense for posts making fun of arbitrary parts of non PHP languages?
You are not your favorite language. And I find most criticisms of most languages to be very valid. I don’t think the intent of OP is to insult all PHP programmers. It’s okay to like a language that has problems. All languages do.
I’d wager prevalence is part of their problem. Jokes get tired after a while, but that doesn’t always mean they stop.
PHP, like any language, has its problems, but it seems to get poked at a lot more often. But making the same joke over and over has been a problem long before reddit was a thing.
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The fault is the programmer for not using a switch statement.
“php doesn’t stop me from coding like a moron, therefore php sucks”
I say that php breaks math entirely, and is therefore bad. “” == null returns true null == [] returns true “” == [] returns false.
In more recent versions it gets worse, because it has 0 == “any text” return true, “any text” == true return true, and 1 == true return true So indirectly 1 = 0, and now math is more directly broken.
How about “php enables me to code like a moron”, or even better, "php breaks common conventions and forces me to think about every little detail and special edge case, slowing me down if I don’t want to accidentally ‘code like a moron’ "
Nested ternary operators emerge because of the lack of if/switch expressions (which is C fault), so they are “useful” (they shouldn’t be). However, PHP is the only language that treats it as left associative. This has 2 problems:
- You are forced to use parenthesis. Some (insane) people might do: (cond1) ? “A” : (cond2) ? “B” : “C” And it makes sense. Its ugly af, but it makes sense. But PHP now forces you to use more parethesis. It’s making you work more.
- It breaks convention. If you come from any other language and use ternary operators, you will get unexpected results. After hours of banging your head against the wall, you realize the problem. And now you have to learn a new edge case in the language, and what to do to actually use the language.
“But you shouldn’t use ternary operators anyway! Use if/switch/polymorphic dispatch/goto/anything else”
True, but still, the feature is there, and its bad. The fact that there are other alternatives doesn’t make the PHP ternary operator worse than other languages’ ternary operator.
PHP works against you. That’s the problem. The ternary operator is not a good example, since there are alternatives. But look at something so simple, so mundane like strpos.
If strpos doesn’t find returns
false. Every other language returns -1. And if you then use this value elsewhere, PHP will cast it to 0 for you. Boom, your program is broken, and you have to stare at the screen for hours, looking for the error.“BuT yOU sHoUlD AlwAyS cHEcK tHe rETurN eRRor!”
And even if that’s true, if we all must check the return value, does PHP force you to do so? Like checked exceptions in Java? Or all the
Option&Resultin Rust? throws, throws, throws… unwrap, unwrap, unwrap… (Many) people hate those featuresPHP works against you. And that’s why its bad.
Sure, it’s counterintuitive, but so is not bracketing things in ternary operations.
You know that programmers of other languages don’t have to find excuses for their tool constantly, right?
You don’t know many languages, huh?
Now do CGI.
Please. I worked with it for five years and I still don’t understand it.
I get hating on PHP is a meme, and the language certainly has faults, but I feel like it’s no more arbitrary than how JavaScript behaves. And just like JavaScript, if you follow modern standards and use a modern version, it’s a much better experience. The language is only as good as the programmer.
Wat.
Finally got it…
$a == 1 ? "one" : ( ( $a == 2 ? "two" : $a == 3 ) ? "three" : "other" )
