Lies in education [was Re: The "loop and a half"]

[Grant Edwards]

On 2017-10-11, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

> But since it's the lowest-end sites that have traditionally driven
> that demand for PHP, there's a general tendency for low-grade
> programmers to gravitate to it, so there's a lot of really REALLY bad
> code out there.

And there are a lot of people providing really REALLY bad answers on
various support fora.  I learned very quickly to pay no attention to
people providing answers to PHP questions on any web-based forum.
I've probably been spoiled by the level of discorse in this
list/group, but I was absolutely dumbfounded by the wrong answers
people drooled onto the interwebs.  PHP is the poster child for
cargo-cult programming where people cut/paste chunks of garbage
without really understanding what they're doing.

Even the official PHP documentation is pretty bad.  It's not usually
outright wrong, but it's very incomplete, and leaves a _lot_ of things
undefined.

Of course the PHP lanugage itself is such a mess, it's often not very
easy to understand what's going on.

--
Grant