RE: why doesnt a[1] = 1 work?

[Jay Carlson <nop@...>]

Don Hopkins writes:

> People should learn from history, like Lua's designers did, instead of 
> repeating the mistakes of the past, like PHP's designers did!

It's awfully charitable of you to place the architects of PHP among those that had a choice.  As far as I can tell, the early and midlife of PHP were guided by "make the demo website work by next week".  Forget "Beyond Good and Evil"; we're talking about a language that cannot seriously consider correct and incorrect as relevant predicates.

It is of course possible to write righteous and correct PHP, and I work with people who do.  However, Bayesian analysis tends to trend that "we did it in PHP", absent further data, likely implies some dude on 4chan has root on your box.

The interesting thing we collectively found out over the last decade was that code that was wrong in the problem set sense was also a great way to let people from other continents complete your assignments.