Discussion: https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/5228
<Friday afternoon trolling is just too easy this week />
I assume things are much better now, but I remember a time when things like INSERT <table> (<date_field>) VALUES ('2015-02-30') would not have raised any sort of error, amongst other terrible things that people would defend having to implement explicit checks for in other layers of your application.
systemd is by no means alone; in the last month I've discovered that `yum` deliberately breaks its output when you try and pipe it to something else (I mean really, ffs, really?). The justification for this isn't even internally consistent which really winds me up too...
Whilst I pick on a couple, there's been innumerable packages, languages and platforms over the years that have had their share of what could politely be called idiosyncrasies. I highly recommend The Unix Haters Handbook [1] for plenty of historic examples -it's a lovely read -oh, and for years one of the *nix bullet points was always "all the power in the world and not a safety in sight" [2]
[1] The Unix Haters Handbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix-Haters_Handbook || http://www.csf.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/BioComp/training/...
[2] The Hole Hawg: https://web.archive.org/web/20150214132948/http://www.team.n...
Gnome depends on logind, which is sensible. Yes, logind is part of a suite of system management tools which also includes tools to manage the boot process.
Your complaint would apply equally to your window manager being intrinsically linked to your serial port (via the Linux kernel).
Until a couple of years ago, my linux box was nearly entirely modular letting me install any combination of boot-loader, kernel, init system userland tools and/or desktop. How is this better?
The best thing to do is to not use mt_rand().
Because this is not a simple, stupid linear congruential generator. mt_rand(), is, as I understand it, based on Mersenne Twister, a well-regarded generator which has a period of 2^19937. And if PHP had done this right, mt_rand() would be seedable with an array of some 624 integers.
Mersenne Twister has an alternative "classic" seeding algorithm, drawn from Knuth, to be compatible with old-style generators. This algorithm takes a 32-bit seed. Apparently that's all that PHP is supplying.
It's dead simple to do random(n) uniformly. When I heard that some language implemented a function called mt_rand() which was hilariously broken in this respect, the first thing that came to my mind was "that's gotta be PHP". And it was.
Returning garbage when one of your parameters is beyond a certain limit is "crazy behavior." Either support it properly, or don't support it at all.
I don't think a language like PHP, or indeed anything written in it, should have undefined behavior but I'm not the author of the library.
If you expect input parameters in some range and you get values out of that range, then you blow up. You don't silently truncate anything and you certainly don't reduce the entropy of your random number generator by nearly 50%.
And yes, in the eleventy billion cases where PHP should yell at you that it's doing something totally different than what you wanted, it instead just goes about its day silently.
MySQL was once actually superior open-source database, being more performant and simpler to setup and use than PostgreSQL. And then, once again, it just got popular.
I don't think being faulty helped these technologies, although it sometimes is the case.
It's not. White it does have several surprising behaviors, "almost everything" is just an example of uniformed BS people say when it comes to PHP.
C also has undefined behavior and several bad decisions, ditto for C++, Javascript, etc. But PHP is just an easy target for trolls.
EDIT: because of HN's annoying "you are posting too fast" limit I cannot reply to the comment below.
The arguments against Exceptions began in the comments on the relevant pull request: https://github.com/php/php-src/pull/1397
At what point do we stop blaming the developers for not knowing how to
use our badly designed features, and accept responsibility for exposing
an API that is hostile towards simple, efficient, and correct implementations? php > echo PHP_INT_MAX;
9223372036854775807