Golbez posted:

I believe it's, the other 25,000 lines of code on the site are all procedural, so why start splitting it up into two camps?

Hammerite posted:

Just because some code uses objects, it doesn't mean that it's object-oriented, or that it's not procedural in style. Are they refusing to use objects whatsoever, or just refusing to allow portions of the codebase to be written in completely object-oriented fashion?

If they are refusing to use objects at all, maybe you could find a part of the existing codebase that would particularly benefit (i.e. be made a lot simpler and more maintainable) from being refactored to use objects, and make the case for doing that. Or if you can make the case for a new piece of code being written using objects, all the better, since that doesn't involve time being spent rewriting working code. You should emphasise that just because it makes use of objects, doesn't mean it's not procedural, and that objects are sometimes an appropriate tool for the job regardless of what style the code is written in.

Golbez posted:

Refusing to allow objects at all. Seeing as how I'm still technically a contract worker and not a full-time employee, I'm not pushing the issue with the guy who's built this thing for the last four years - but once I have an actual job there, I'll find some way of pushing harder without pestering/sounding like a dick.

The best place for what you say would be the db code, which (if you pay attention to my posts, you know) uses mysql, rather than mysqli or PDO. What we have works, so long as we remember to escape everything, but ... I really don't know how to push this further without coming across as, well, pushy.

Golbez posted:

Refusing to allow objects at all.

McGlockenshire posted:

This is a dangerous, dangerous sign. The lead is very likely suffering from one or more of a handful of problems.

*He has a single, unified vision of where his software is going, and has no intention of allowing external input. This may be true especially if no code gets written without his explicit permission and/or direction.

quote:

*Worse, he doesn't have a single, unified version of where his software is going, or he has one and is unable to articulate it. This may be true especially if other coders on the project constantly have to ask for guidance or clarification.

quote:

*He may have first experienced excessive OO wankery, such as a Java framework that requires a dozen layers of indirection to get anything done, and believes that such dangerous levels of obsessive idiocy is what OO actually is.

quote:

*And finally, he may not understand OO and is thus afraid of it. This is the worst possible problem, and is frankly the most likely given that you're still using the mysql extension.

quote:

The project I now lead at work was built by someone that matched parts of this profile. You do not want to work under someone like this. It took the entire team threatening to ragequit (and one doing so) and some major pushing from management before he realized the scale of the problem. He quit. You might not be so lucky. (Then again, I'm not so lucky. I'm responsible for maintaining and now replacing this clusterfuck. Hopefully after I'm long gone, my name won't be cursed weekly as his is...)

rugbert posted:

But what if, in that foreach, i need to also grab the poo poo in that last array (extras) under music?

Hammerite posted:

rugbert posted:

ha sorry, I just woke up. Fixed my post

Sorry, I meant to echo those values. Want if I wanted to also display the values in "extras". Would I make another foreach?

Hammerite posted:

How do you want to echo them? If you want them comma-separated, you could use

echo implode(', ', $product["extras"]);

rugbert posted:

I was planning on putting them into a select box actually, or into a list. so each item in the "extras" array would be in a list item or an option

Golbez posted:

It's been his for four years, I might be the first new one, I don't know. There's no other coders but us.

McGlockenshire posted:

This also explains much. Learning to work as a team is a challenge.

Iron Squid posted:

I'm working on a small script for a website. Its my first PHP project, and I need some advice.

I have a sign-up form that the user can enter some information. I'd like to spread this info out over several pages. Basically, the user enters a small bit of info, clicks next, and enters more info. Repeat until all info is collected.

Should I have one php script do this, or should each page have its own php script?

Iron Squid posted:

I'm working on a small script for a website. Its my first PHP project, and I need some advice.

I have a sign-up form that the user can enter some information. I'd like to spread this info out over several pages. Basically, the user enters a small bit of info, clicks next, and enters more info. Repeat until all info is collected.

Should I have one php script do this, or should each page have its own php script?

Sylink posted:

Anyone ever work with calling python scripts through PHP?

I want to have PHP present the front-end interface and deal with passing information and have python do grunt work in the background.

I am led to believe this is very possible but I'm not sure the right way to go about it.

This is all in a standard LAMP environment so having python is not an issue.''

I can do it with exec is there anything I should be worried about?

McGlockenshire posted:

php:

<?php
$foo = range(1, 100);
$bar = array();
foreach($foo as $baz)
    $bar[] = &$baz;
print_r($bar);

more

Cadoc posted:

What's different? I do not use the & before $baz.

Golbez posted:

Is there any drawback to this apart from code clarity? It suddenly occurred to me that it seemed weird to insist on declaring my arrays.

Golbez posted:

You don't have to declare anything in PHP. $i = 5, $s = 'fnord', etc.

But I've noticed I tend to declare arrays:

php:

<?
$array = array();
while (whatever) $array[] = 'shazam';
?>

and I realized I could drop the first line there; square-bracket syntax creates if it does not exist, I believe. Is there any drawback to this apart from code clarity? It suddenly occurred to me that it seemed weird to insist on declaring my arrays.

Golbez posted:

You don't have to declare anything in PHP. $i = 5, $s = 'fnord', etc.

But I've noticed I tend to declare arrays:

[snip]

and I realized I could drop the first line there; square-bracket syntax creates if it does not exist, I believe. Is there any drawback to this apart from code clarity? It suddenly occurred to me that it seemed weird to insist on declaring my arrays.

DaTroof posted:

With strict errors enabled, referencing an undefined variable triggers a notice. Also, as McGlockenshire demonstrated, it can cause unexpected problems elsewhere and make your code harder to debug. You can get away with it, but it's not best practice.

Golbez posted:

Referencing, yes. Setting to, no. If I did "echo $foo[1]" before declaring $foo, that'd throw a notice. But doing "$foo[1] = 'bar'" won't throw an error, even if $foo hasn't been declared. So far as I know.

quote:

I've never seen this construction anywhere else. Think there's a reason for that?

Lumpy posted:

Unless there is some really compelling reason to do this ("it looks cool" is NOT a compelling reason), forms should not be spread out over multiple pages. There are lots of usability studies showing multiple-page forms have much lower completion rates, higher error rates, and frustrate users morethan single page forms.

Iron Squid posted:

Actually, I was thinking about this today: How long should a form be before it gets split up into multiple pages. After doing my form, it was no more than twenty questions so I'm probably going to leave it all as one page.

On a vaguely related not, HOW DO I USE GLOBAL VARIABLES IN PHP? Specifically, I want to keep a bunch of variables in an include file. Lets call it variables.php. Inside this I have something like:

code:

$html_title = "Title of My Web Page";

Then in my index.php file, I want to do something like:

code:

echo "<title>$title</title>";

This doesn't work for me. I know there's some issues with the way PHP handles global files, but I'm too tired from work to figure it out.

fletcher posted:

That should work fine, assuming you use the same variable name. In your example here you mix using $html_title and $title. Also make sure you are including variables.php in index.php.

Iron Squid posted:

Whoops. I was typing that from memory. Fixed now.

Iron Squid posted:

Err, actually I wrote my code incorrectly. The code looks more like this:

code:

$html_title = "Title of Webpage";

function printTitle(){
     echo "Welcome to $html_title";
}

When I call printTitle(), only the text "Welcome to " gets printed, not the text attached to $html_title. I think this is because PHP handles functions and global variables in an odd way, but I'm not sure how to rectify it.

Iron Squid posted:

Err, actually I wrote my code incorrectly. The code looks more like this:

code:

$html_title = "Title of Webpage";

function printTitle(){
     echo "Welcome to $html_title";
}

When I call printTitle(), only the text "Welcome to " gets printed, not the text attached to $html_title. I think this is because PHP handles functions and global variables in an odd way, but I'm not sure how to rectify it.

Maniaman posted:

Is it a horribly bad idea to use short tags? I've been writing an inhouse app that makes heavy use of <?=$foo;?> as opposed to <?php echo $foo; ?>. I'm not super concerned with portability (its an in-house app) but more concerned with them removing the short tags in a later version.