“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL”

Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by justinator on Thursday July 12, 2018 @03:37PM (#17517920)

I caught the part about, "we have unitialized variables being passed everywhere which should be numbers" and that code, well, smells.

I think the PHP team changing the return value of a function without putting anything in a changelog is a Very Bad Idea and a dev. should be pretty upset about that. Saying that the main dev. is doing this work as a charitable thing is fairly misleading as well.

Buuuuut, I also think passing an unitialized value like that is already a bug in this context given the type of software being created. I'd rather see, "NULL" found wherever than know that it was magically changed to 0 (like they would prefer). I know the dev. said that this is just a formatting thing, but I'll wager they're using formatted numbers for some sort of calculation (inadvertently or not).

Whatever is going on, I hope there was a huge code review and a massive QA effort ( which I also doubt happened), because this is a textbook example of tech debt and the loan shark has come a-knockin'.

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Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by ScottBurson on Thursday July 12, 2018 @05:03PM (#17518587)

I agree with this as far as it goes, but I think @zaphar has the better answer: a tax app should never have been written in PHP to begin with.

There's a fundamental quandary in language design: accessibility to novice programmers and suitability for serious work are in opposition. Novices, being novices, are unable to appreciate this problem.

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Re:“I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from be... by justinator on Thursday July 12, 2018 @05:20PM (#17518712)

Oh dude: absolutely agreed on that.

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