php hooligans

Embracing the PHP philosophy

A fractal of bad design?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/raindrift

There is no design

no single dictator or design committee

PHP assimilates

and nothing gets thrown away

what some call quirks

- needle haystack or haystack needle -

- to under_score or not -

others may call 'backwards compatibility'

learn to use code completion

P.S.

array function? -> needle haystack

string function? -> haystack needle

design patterns

MVC,factory,singleton,observer,

listener,strategy,decorator,active

record,gateway,proxy,adapter

cute, so you're a hotshot programmer

now what does this

AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean

actually do?

keep it simple

don't use design patterns just because you can

don't name your functions after generic design patterns

design patterns are a code smell

we're not programming java here

these are not the types you are looking for

php isn't fuzzy about types

avoid type hints and embrace duck typing

everything is a string

remember this and PHP will not surprise you

too often

PHP is designed for web applications

variables passed through GET or POST are strings

so PHP assumes anything is a kind of string

use === and !== to avoid surprises

object oriented

it's not what you think

Avoid objects

Never use objects where simple types suffice

Objects are shared state

shared state leads to complexity

Arrays in PHP are fast and flexible

They are passed by value

with copy-on-write

e.g.


   $info = $treeNode->info;
   $treeNode->cd('..');
   $info2 = $treeNode->info;

this leads to problems

unless node->cd() returns a new object


   $info2 = \mylib\tree::cd($treeNode, '..')->info;

This makes it explicit

AVOID INHERITANCE

embrace composition and encapsulation

use 'final' and 'private'
(some hooligans disagree)

call it dependency injection and you are cool too

large class hierarchies are a code smell

keep it small

when in doubt, leave it out

don't overthink, build what you need now

The best code is no code

unit test only find bugs in what they test

the number of bugs per line of code is a constant

so by writing half the code you avoid half the bugs

keep the php spirit

conform to the language

work with standard types if at all possible

emulate them if not

( toString(), ArrayObject, etc.)

keep the learning curve low

finally: steal

there is a lot of useful code out there

even if you don't like the quality, chances are they fixed problems you haven't found yet

http://phptrends.com/

http://packagist.org/

do check the license though