X XFediYour place in the Fediverse
XFEDI

Conversation

ActivityPub

So, no matter how bad the PHP fallout proves to be, I have to concede that they *have* cleaned up their act quite a bit in recent years and these sorts of bugs out of PHP are much, much rarer than they used to be

Did you know that, when I was a fiery young programmer in my 20s, I ran a hate blog dedicated to the PHP manual and how bad, unreliable, and unhelpful it was? Here are some highlights:

Special snowflake not-actually-a-function isset() https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/52082199266/unsettling

The notorious strcmp() footgun https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/44634822304/i-am-so-comically-angry-right-now

When 1 equals 4096 https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/33023415508/when-does-one-byte-equal-four-kilobytes

PBKDF API designed to trip you up https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/66426423275/i-cant-spell-pbkdf

And, my favorite, a review of the complete original PHP 2.0 manual from the late 90s: https://phpmanualmasterpieces.tumblr.com/post/65544023819/php-20-a-review-in-retrospect

(The picture of Espurr in that post links to a domain that used to play the Lavender Town theme. Please put on Lavender Town yourself for full effect)

All these posts are 12 to 15 years old and do not necessarily reflect the current state of either the documentation or the code. Gods, I hope they don't.

#php

↩ Reply ♡ 0 · ↻ 0 ↗ Original

Oct 21, 2026 · 11:20 UTC

Replies