It seems Stack Overflow is fiercely opposed to such changes. So I am posting here out of naive hope that may be some startup will find this idea worthy. It's still looks very consistent to me
So, given you "don't care what happens to PHP", I assume you don't give much heed to whether it's winning or dying. That's basically what @deanclatworthy is saying, so there is nothing to fight about. Cheers!
Without giving a hint on the market share of PHP in the future, I think it tells something about its attraction force.
I mean, I didn't coded much Ruby over the last months in professional projects, but I am still interested with its evolution because it was such a delight to use it with Rails.
Regarding PHP, well, I did some in the past, and my next professional project include to deal with a PHP code base. In the meantime, I didn't care to use it or look at how it was evolving, which is "as exciting as your toothbrush" innovations.
I'm not fighting, I just gave a single data point that invalidated (logically, not actually) one part of his argument (the one I quoted) :) And then a bit of commentary.
I remember reading an article about Ben Underwood[1]. It was headlined with something like a blind boy can play video games using an echolocation. It turned out he just remembers the right succession of moves after a lot of try and fails. On the one hand, I should blame the author, not the boy for the title. But when I tried to research the topic, all I was able to find is only a couple articles using similar gimmicks, so I became quite skeptical.
Exactly. I'm wary because it would be very easy for this to be a clever Hans situation. There are many signals blind and low vision people use to help themselves that it's very hard not to conflate them.
"escaping input" is a notorious delusion. And a bad one.
- it is not "input" must be treated, but, so to say - output. It's the destination that matters, not the source. By the time you get the input, you have no idea how and where it will be used. You can tell it right before the output (or, rather, better to call it "use") only. Say, you've got some input that didn't pass the verification and you will have to display it back in the HTML form. And if you already "escaped" it for SQL, it will be malformed. And vice-versa. Moreover, any data must be formatted properly before use, not just something that you tagged as "input".
- the word treated above is for a reason. Because the term "escaping" suggests some certain routine in PHP, which is the actual reason for numerous SQL injections.
You're right, my wording was inexact - we must always escape strings that can be controlled in some fashion by the user.
I'm working on comprehensive taint analysis for PHP[0], and I'm spending a bunch of time thinking about how to automatically detect those dirty strings.
You'd laugh at me, but I am still using a LiveJournal clone - Dreamwidth. This pre-social network is quite comfortable to be in. It is, so-to say, non-invasive. You'd never see a post from someone you didn't subscribe to. There are no ads. No mental viruses to pick-up. Just what a social media is meant to be for ordinary people to keep in touch with some friends. And of course there is no mobile client to ring a dozen times a hour. I just read my friends list when it is comfortable for me.
And I visit my facebook account weekly, via desktop browser, only to see what's up with my friends hanging up there.
I very seldom do likes, as I know that my likes could show up in my friends' feeds. There are NO notifications from social network or media on my phone. I call it "information hygiene".
And yes, like others mentioned, I've got A LOT of spare time for books, hobbies, movies etc.
What are you talking about is just a syntax. Which is not an issue for a PHP dev nowadays. I am typing much more custom method names than vanilla PHP functions. And when I have, my IDE shows me the right syntax after a few keystrokes.
So, it's apparently a good reason to hate, but by no means a reason not to use PHP.
And on its quest towards JIT the language becomes less and less dynamically typed. strict_types=1 is already a standard in most major applications and all the cleanup that has been done already, such as count() raises an error if you try to count a non-countable variable, and many more.
I always wanted to have an incognito browser as default option on my mobile. Recently I chanced to discover Firefox Focus on Google Play and that's exactly what I wanted. Now it's the default option to open random links, whereas Chrome and vanilla Firefox are used for the several trusted cities with permanent authorization.
If your goal is to post, then SO is excellent. But if your goal is also to read, there are questions. Nobody ever tried to use Stack Overflow without Google yet. given all its bell and whistles are intended for those who want to post, there are questions yet to answer.
I use SO without Google sometimes, in this way: I search for a phrase or tag, and read the 20 - 30 highest upvoted questions & answers about that — and I learn a lot, sometimes things that I didn't know, that I ought to know.
