Why PHP is better than JavaScript

I started developing a small project using node.js with express and socket.io. Node is a nice server and socket.io is great. However, I’m having issues with javascript. Currently, two things really get on my nerves:

1. the plus operator

Most of the hard-to-debug bugs in my javascript code come from the + operator. It decides to concatenate strings instead of add numbers. Considering that all stuff that goes over the wire (i.e. socket.io) is treated as strings, it’s really painful and ugly to have parseInt(…, 10) everywhere. PHP solves this issue with simple dot operator. Simple, no-brainer and always does what you expect. You don’t have to think where does the data come from. Update: I just discovered that "select sum(...) from ..." in MySQL also yields a string. Aaargh.

2. foreach

I miss PHP’s foreach so bad. Consider:

for (ix in really.long[expression].toGet.theStuff) {
    if (really.long[expression].toGet.theStuff[ix].value < 10 && really.long[expression].toGet.theStuff[ix] > 5) {
        ...do something

versus PHP’s:

foreach ($really.long[expression].toGet.theStuff as $ix=>$value) {
    if ($value < 10 && $value > 5) {
        ....do something

Of course, one could assign the array element to some local variable, and so I have local variables all around wasting code lines and making code error prone (if you need to change the collection you are iterating, you have to change in two places).

Tweet to @mbabuskov Milan Babuškov, 2011-12-01