PHP is Wack. (Coding in a Random Language Every Day)

Advent of Code 2023 is UPON US! What better way to spend the holiday season, learn to program, and test your skills against your friends. This year, I've decided to try something kind of insane. I'll be choosing a language off the wheel every day.... let's see what happens.
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[@dominick253]

Php = Lambo.

[@1337Munkey]

Personal Home Page.. More like Pretty Hacky Programming!!

[@reed6514]

​@@1337Munkey😂 it can be very hacky, but these days we have strong property typing, return types, dynamic properties disallowed by default, enums (idk why it took so long to get enums). Variables are still not typed, but editor tools alleviate that problem, and that's most always in a limited scope, so its not so bad for maintainability.

[@WhiteDoppler]

I do pcp in my php lambo

[@illegalsmirf]

If you are trying to get better at Rust, PHP probably isn't your thing. The latest and greatest in the world of Javascript is more like it for you. Just don't forget to die your hair a bright luminous color, get a nose ring, and make your gender and sexuality fully fluid.

[@illegalsmirf]

Basically you'd got all the boilerplate and crap that you've got in Java and C#, why not just switch to one of those languages if that's your bag?@@reed6514

[@peppybocan]

You know you can run PHP in a CLI and you don't need to run it as a webserver, right?

[@soniablanche5672]

you can even use PHP own's development server

[@Lelende]

Channel is called low level learning not unsafe server side programming learning.

[@peppybocan]

huh? Doesn't matter.@@Lelende

[@mitchelline]

@@Lelende What he is doing in the video is equally unsafe as running it in the terminal. The difference is, in terminal he can use ' ', and he won't need a web server. It's just easier

[@jolynele2587]

you know he clearly states his speciality as "low level" and not a web language right

[@dave7244]

Nothing wrong with PHP. Fed up of people saying it is rubbish.

[@musdevfrog]

"Regex is powerful" "I don't wanna do it"

[@walrusbyte263]

A regex moment

[@nikolthomas2544]

step1: Have a problem step2: Decide to solve the problem with regex step3: You now have 2 problems

[@31redorange08]

The code was very bad even for PHP standards. 🤐

[@Car0linaPh03nix]

"Ah fuck, this is a regex challenge." "Nah, fuck it, I'm doing explode." "Actually, fuck it, I'm going back to regex." "Nevermind, fuck, back to explode."

[@Finkelfunk]

As someone who does the AoC in Haskell I can tell you that doing it in Haskell has no ill side effects.

[@ChungusTheLarge]

Would love to see your whitepaper!

[@Stroopwafe1]

So all your solutions are *pure*? /j

[@matthewbass8152]

@@ChungusTheLarge lol

[@perigord6281]

Same, parsing is a breeze

[@kacperuminski1547]

Yep, solutions thus far have been rather simple. No more than 20 lines...

[@artik15xfilm]

Please setup a timer so we would see the total time that it has taken for u to code that :D

[@Zendo909]

Let the man fail in peace.

[@d0rban]

the bro just set up a whole web server instead of just using the interpreter 💀

[@spicynoodle7419]

Bruh you don't need Nginx to run PHP. Do you need Express to run JS?

[@marklonergan3898]

It's funny seeing different variable naming conventions. For your MinRed, MinGreen and MinBlue, you're obviously looking at it from the final perspective (i.e. the minimum amount of each required). I would have named them MaxRed, MaxGreen & MaxBlue on the basis that the variable is storing the max value observed. Not saying either approach is worse / wrong, i just find it interesting.

[@pmmeurcatpics]

Yeah I think the most pedantic way to name these variables would be something like "CumulativeMax"+ColorName

[@Zendo909]

Seems like engineer's vs theoretician's perspective. You @marklonergan3898, with a theoretician's approach, are focused on exploring the system's limits, while LLL, with an engineer's mindset, is concentrating on determining the minimal requirements essential for the system's functionality. I, myself, am much more a theoretician.

[@MDMAviation]

As a PHP dev, watching you use parentheses in echoes, double quotes instead of single quotes, str comparsion with that, not tripple equals, true in uppercase, or even comparing something to true to return true and evaluate it wou... And there are constants in PHP too

[@reed6514]

Watching him write PHP was so painful. And I'm surprised he's not friendly with regex. It's long been a love of mine.

[@edgeeffect]

This is one of the real problems with PHP... the web is overflowing with half-assed examples, hints and tutorials written by people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing... if you do what any newbie would do in any language and Google for help, with PHP, your chances of striking garbage are SO high.

[@reed6514]

@@edgeeffect yeah, i started out writing very bad php partially bc of that. But php was also very bad when i started lol. It's also a benefit though, because the "bad" php is probably an easier way to get your foot in the door of programming.

[@MDMAviation]

@@reed6514 Even tought PHP was "bad" in the past, not bad but a scripting language more than a serious lang, doesn't mean it wasn't possible to write good code. In fact, for me PHP in the origin was similar to Python, that's why I think Python is bad, thanks god PHP is evolving to a typed language.

[@phpannotated]

Always fun to see how people that don't know PHP write PHP 😂 Great video!

[@thisisnotok2100]

Why did he do it as a server and not just do it from the command line like you would with python 😭😭😭

[@pokefreak2112]

PHP is the C of scripting languages. Imperfect and ugly in many ways, but somehow still the best solution for the problems it's trying to solve. Your PHP setup was kinda overcomplicated, you could've just ran your php file from the CLI without needing a web server.

[@eptic-c]

Also he could have used the integrated dev server if he really wanted it on the web or enable error debugging in nginx instead of making nginx display 500 error pages. Most people will think that is the debugging experience of php when in reality PHP is really helpful at debugging code and knowing where the code crashes ( compared to other interpreted languages anyway ).

[@pokefreak2112]

@@eptic-c I think it's because PHP has a culture of working in prod where you don't wanna turn on stack traces. Imo working without errors is a nice skill to get decent at (forces you to internalize the syntax and libraries), but proper errors are also essential when working on complex systems

[@vladimmi]

@@pokefreak2112 "I think it's because PHP has a culture of working in prod" - it doesn't.

Is it Lua considered in the language wheel? I think is a ligth and powerful scripting language suitable for this kind of challenges :)

[@john_hawley]

Not sure why you created a whole web server? Maybe that's a common misconception about PHP.

[@minilathemayhem]

PHP is great! It just depends on what version of PHP you're using

[@TheMasonX23]

Thanks for inspiring me to use this Advent of Code to get more familiar with Rust. I've been playing around with it for a few weeks but was looking for a project to really get to know it and this seemed like the perfect fit!

[@Notverygoodatall]

Rust sucks

[@skeleton_craftGaming]

I'd rather program in PHP than JavaScript. (I say as someone who has written both recently)

[@climatechangedoesntbargain9140]

why?

[@ajzack983]

me too

[@edgeeffect]

Funny... I would say exactly the opposite.

[@__abd__]

I did it with regex just in a diffrent way, i had a pattern for each red green blue "(\d+) red" and then got all matches and summed group one

[@MartinDerTolle]

Nice

[@kauemiziara916]

I'm doing a similar challenge and today's language was Lua. As far as Stack Overflow, Google and GPT told me, the only way to split strings is using "patterns", which are basically simplified regex ='( At least Lua's patterns are way better than pure regex, so I wasn't forced to give up on the second day.

[@caduhidalgo4996]

The disappointed face of lll as soon as it showed it was PHP was remarkable hahah Nice video!

[@LowLevelLearning]

Thanks 😅

[@MrKasenom]

I love how Pascal is in the same category as brainfuck for him 😂

[@tobiasaddicks9695]

Perfect timing, I finished the challenge myself and now get to see how someone else solved it

[@drivers99]

gforth I did the first couple days in that last year. But only after doing it in another language (python) first. The funny thing was forth works by letting you define words, so I defined a handful of words that let me execute the input for 2022 day 1 as a program lol

[@gustavodill3819]

I love that almost all the coding videos i watch are about making it relatively efficient, readable and reusable. Low Level Learning showed what truly ends up happening. *"If it works, it works!"*

[@alitahboub493]

i enjoyed developing in php

[@NOT_A_ROBOT]

you should indicate in your title that this is episode 2 of the series

[@boston.boston]

I've done the last two days in Nim, there's some really neat solutions. Hoping you land on Nim this month.

[@Ferrohh]

I literally found out your channel yesterday and I already fell in love with your content. I'm also trying to do this challenge but I'm able to code well only in like 4/5 languages.

[@LowLevelLearning]

I can code in a lot of languages, but no one said it was good ;)

You inspired me to take the AoC challenge. Could I sugegst to add PowerShell script language to the wheel? ;)

[@BeautyMarkRush]

I'm so used to PHP 8.2 by now that I automatically thought of using a match instead of a chain of if's. lol

[@MECHANISMUS]

I first thought that this is some kind of standard problem called "red jacks", but then realized it's only how regex is in fact pronounced by the natives.

[@reed6514]

😂😂 I will forever pronounce the hard g.

[@PhysiKarlz]

You probably then pronounce Jack incorrectly too, like djäcks/djecks, if you think jacks sounds like gex in regex. Very different sounds.

[@thisisnotok2100]

If you actually have to use brainfuck, it might be easier to write the solution in another language then write a brainfuck code generator 😂

[@ItsCOMMANDer_]

if he gets one wrong, he should replace it with malboge.

[@jomy10-games]

Can’t wait for Objective-C++

[@yothebob8162]

Its cool to see how other people confronted this challenge, I broke it out in chars and had match triggers on r, g, b and numbers.

[@GDNachoo]

1. PHP error reporting was off the entire video... 2. Your kid's first language should be Scratch, actually, it's way more appealing and teaches you code basics more than HTML

[@enkiimuto1041]

tbh if you're going with scratch instead of much simpler drag and drop things, might as well pick gml.

[@GDNachoo]

@@enkiimuto1041 I repeat: it's way more appealing, you ain't gonna get a young kid into coding with GML, and i mean 7-years-old young, at least that's the age i picked up scratch by myself, you get to see results of your code really quickly and it's insanely simple

[@PalladinPoker]

​​​@@enkiimuto1041gotta disagree, my high school used Scratch to teach the initial principles and it was far more intuitive than the abortion of a language we had to use afterwards. We could make games in it with only a handful of hours. Dim xArr(1 To 3) As Integer = {1, 2, 3} If you know you know

[@Bozebo]

If it wasn't abusive to keep a kid isolated from the world. I'd get them started on assembly, they'd just take it up naturally without knowing better and then you have a genius on your hands xD

[@konstantinsotov6251]

Since you've said that Brainfuck and Haskell are banned, I would suggest something that kinda combines them Mathematical description of turing machine that solves the problem

[@seanvogel8067]

I didn’t think part one was going to work because I didn’t see you account for the fact that you can have multiple entries for each color. However, it is kind of hard to follow the code on the iPad. And apparently it did work. 😬

[@eptic-c]

You know php cli does exists right? And is the default of the language. Also, nginx or apache is not required as you can start a server if you really want a web environment from php directly.

[@akoskulcsar350]

I LOVE THIS "SERIES"!!!

[@j.r.r.tolkien8724]

I wish you'd stream this a day later so I could watch live after having taken the entire day to solve it myself 😂

[@patrickoberholzer4278]

Love how at the beginning Haskell was put in the same category as Brainf**k.

[@raptoress6131]

Y'know COBOL is not so bad as long as you don't try to do anything that requires dynamic memory allocation.

[@damian007567]

You can run PHP in a CLI. You can also use the pre tag to render CRLF. In all honesty php is probably the best language to challenges like this besides python. (Not even kidding)

[@AndrewTSq]

I will try tomorrows challenge in PHP then :) I used Javascript so far, and it have worked great also.

[@reed6514]

Yeah, I thought this looked super easy to do in php, buut tbf I've been devving php for a decade.& he doesn't even know he can make a cli script lol 😂

[@hovnocuc4551]

Facts. PHP has extremelly rich stdlib. It's not particullary consistent, but you can get very far without installing a single dependency. It's just the tutorials talking basics around the web are written by indians running XAMP for 20 years and still doing something horrible on every other line.

[@imqqmi]

I don't think there's anything wrong with regex, though regex is often hard to read. It usually can do with some comments as to what it tries to accomplish or a reference to the work item in a backlog manager. Regex can also have performance issues so sometimes it pays to do things with string manipulation. The input file (unless it was a requirement) could also be in a database, pre split or just as an array in the code if hardcoded isn't a problem, or as a config file with better formatting. When working with a set of rules I usually put this into comments first and then work out the programming steps, sometimes it's a jumble to keep track where you're heading. And using a debugger and stepping through will allow you to quickly spot problems.

[@christophfriedrich5092]

Wondering why not using PHP in CLI mode on the commandline instead of a webserver...

[@illegalsmirf]

PHP is just grand. Syntax is nearly identical to C. Indeed, you could say PHP is like C for web programming.

[@AJMansfield1]

Interesting that you didn't pick up on the fact that there's no functional distinction between the comma and semicolon in this specific challenge.

[@Rockyzach88]

Same goes for another popular coder I watch on youtube. Maybe we need to make our own video series! lol

[@TimL_]

Brilliant keep it up.

[@mandokir]

Not only could you run PHP CLI, you could just set the content-type to "text/plain". PHP is not the problem; you are.

[@DarkblooM_IO]

Why don't you print the output in your terminal?

[@playtimeplay4518]

why does it seem people always dislike regex? regex has always been the easy route if I can't figure out anything else.

[@reed6514]

I love regex, but it IS tricky & its a very different mental model than traditional programming language. I never have gotten good at lookarounds though & I'm sure there's other gaps in my regex knowledge

[@minilathemayhem]

Regex gets a lot of hate because of how quickly it can become complicated. Like, if you're doing something simple like checking a pattern, it's pretty easy, but when you start adding in things like capture groups, back references, and more complicated search patterns, it gets really confusing and difficult to follow really quickly.

[@nate7803]

I did this in Go to get better at it and ended up parsing it byte by byte 😂😂. It took forever. I could of just done splits but I felt like a challenge. Part 2 was easy the way I did part 1. Felt good.

[@roberthickman4092]

You can run php on the command line you know :)

[@bloodynoobtubename]

As someone who writes parsers for SIEM log ingestion at work, I don't blame you for avoiding regex.

[@PoProstuLatanie]

Add x86 assembly onto the wheel, i dare you

[@paulchamberlain7942]

I never learned grep, can i take your review to mean its still not worth learning?

[@arnabsurbhamsur2416]

im doing in go started off same as you but midway went, yep this is a regex challenge. Then implemented using regex

[@AnthonyBullard]

This is so simple you could hand write a single pass parser in Go for it in no time.

[@Tordhaugs]

Why not do Fortran. If someone watches it and become a programer in it they have safe work out there life. And would be very fun

[@max-mr5xf]

Erlang would be a fun one. But I guess Elixir is close enough.

[@daniels-mo9ol]

One liner: 'sudo apt-get install php-cli -y' done.

[@einargs]

Try ATS. It's like someone took dependent ml and bred it with rust

[@asdfghyter]

I honestly don't mind regex at all and haven't regretted when I've used it. sure it can grow in complexity quickly when the problem is even the slightest bit tricky, but it can be really nice when the problem is fairly simple

[@Daniel_WR_Hart]

From my experience regex is like recursion: at first it's really confusing and you wonder if it's even worth learning, but once you get the hang of it, it's a very powerful/convenient tool in the odd cases where it's not strictly necessary but is very fast to write and easy to read (for other people that also learned it anyways)

[@janAkaliKilo]

This regex bit at the end is no joke. You know how many billion dollars companies lost because of regex and how many programs are running in production with regex bombs waiting to explode.

[@GaymerJenn]

This is my first year doing Advent of Code, so maybe this is a dumb question, but how do people solve both challenges in 2-3 minutes without cheating somehow? On day 1, someone got the first star in 12 seconds. I can see someone really experienced finishing both in 5-10 minutes, but you can't even read the challenge in 12 seconds!

[@LowLevelLearning]

This year it honestly could just be AI. Like, you're not supposed to do that, but people could setup prompts before hand, copy paste the prompt and their data, and get a solution quickly.

[@spicywe1ner]

a few people record their entire session. I think the person sitting in 4th is using python to do it. but 12 seconds is a little insane.

[@orterves]

12 seconds seems too fast even for an AI to generate and submit the answer - seems more likely they found an exploit to get the questions (or answers) early

[@esiarpze7908]

There are few techniques that you can use to solve very fast, like using string parsing libraries and knowing the ins and outs of your language, and basically only reading the sample input/output and guessing what needs to be done. The first day was quite easy as you just needed to get the first digit from one end and you can repeat the same logic by reversing the string. Competitive programmers are really good at these stuffs, so I’m not surprised by the 12 seconds.

[@orterves]

@@esiarpze7908 well, fair enough, I could just be massively underestimating their skills and the approach they take to the solution - I'd love to see it done live

[@Ali-Aljufairi]

The way you code today is 😂 way differenet than yestedary where you had error handling and stuff

[@codecaine]

Nim needs to be on the wheel :)

[@Rockyzach88]

Maybe I should make my own videos. All you need to do is check what the number is before the letter 'r', 'g', 'b' for each line. You don't even need to parse the game ID as you can use a counter because the gameIDs are sequential. Also, I just subtracted bad games from the sum(1 to 100) = 5050. Because you only need 1 bad pull and the series of pulls is bad. EDIT: I do commend you on getting the answer correct the first time though. I usually have to miss a few times and tinker my way to success.

[@AnthonyBullard]

Is COBOL off the table for suggestions? That would be infotainment at its finest

[@Ben_EH-Heyeh]

Lisp, Scheme, Guile is not on your wheel. Could you make a video on the Lem Editor? It has vi-mode...

[@Dygear]

I feel like I should give something back to this channel and so you some of the cooler parts of PHP. You’ll be amazed.

[@reed6514]

And we even have enums and strong typing now! I was reluctant to get on board with strong typing and now i just think that was really dumb of me lol. I thought of PHP's dynamicness as a feature, but not any more ... unless I'm prototyping. It's nice to prototype and not worry about types and stuff.

[@Dygear]

@@reed6514 Oh, I hopped right on the strong type train. Very happy to see that around. You can still prototype very quickly, but when you go to production you can have the strictness needed for a sane working environment. But even things like match statements coming to PHP was super nice. Used them a lot in Rust and it was so nice when they came to PHP as well. Enums and backed enums are also awesome, but kinda toothless when it's compared to their Rust counterpart. You can't for example build a Result Enum, or an Option Enum because the enums themselves can't carry an arbitrary value of T. They can only be Strings or Ints. This hamstrung their Enums in PHP, but it's still nice to have a saner option for building up interfaces with known types and values.

[@ZihadJoy]

what is the name of you nvim theme?

[@LandonEmma]

ah... I love PHP, the coding for forums...

[@zlsKeksia]

"this is a regex challege..I have to do regex"... "fuck regex" nice!

[@0x636f6d70696c65]

You should do one with the god's blessed language TempleOS HolyC

[@BobGoldfield]

Please actually finish this series all way through

[@BIGININ]

You can read the entire file directly into an array: $lines = file("day2.txt");

[@codecaine]

php naming convention is all over the place

[@etiennez0r846]

you could’ve write nice php code with print command and running it from console instead of a web server with a bunch of echos br tags 😢

[@ayoubelmhamdi7920]

the idea of random language is genius, but these challenge need to prove online, not with video editing ❤😂

[@neversinkmakes]

How do you feel about Scheme (a variant of Lisp)? 😁

[@AnthonyBullard]

No, Clojure so he has to install the JVM and figure out all the crazy build systems

[@element1111]

Hope Nim will come up some day on that wheel.

[@soundzthevibewalker]

It's interesting how stereotypes about php are still stuck in the heads of people. But the most interesting thing is that your code feels old. I get that feeling about c and c++ code a lot. It always feels like it was written about 20 years ago

[@evoboy67]

You need to add Swift on that wheel

[@jakereed7180]

malbolge should be on the wheel 😂

[@Elesario]

I feel like regex has been overly maligned. If you struggle then you just haven't learnt it well enough; perhaps we should add Perl to your code wheel ;)

[@KaiDoesMineCraft10]

Please do some Swift this challenge Or Obj-C if you wanna get strange

[@MrPeercraft]

I wanna see Fortran so bad.

[@konstantinsotov6251]

"How to say that you are 40 years old without saying that you are 40 years old?" jkjk

[@MrPeercraft]

@@konstantinsotov6251 actually I'm a student that has to do some Fortran for some calculation software. Honestly, it's not so Bad as long as you want to do number crunching. If you want to use it for anything else you'r in for a miserable time.

[@Macaroni_King]

Bfk is silly but COBOL, amirite? 😎

[@dreamofeternalhappiness8001]

💂 Back to the 90s. Still, you did those much faster than I did with Python.

[@dropnec6660]

damn bro do you edit your videos? cus this was hella fast

[@dropnec6660]

i mean you edited it and uploaded it fast , not that the video is of small length

[@LowLevelLearning]

i do

[@rek4568]

Minecraft Functions to be more specific make a datapack

[@GeekRedux]

6:08 Pushing the big button for all the "HTML is not a language" folks, there, I see.

[@thephilvz]

You could have used the php interpreter to get it to work in a terminal, not bother with html.

[@reed6514]

I prefer an executable script with the php shebang at the top, much more than running php file_name.php

[@arturtwardzik5528]

Actually, you've inspired me yesterday to pick up the AoC challenge, but I modified the rules slightly for my personal usage. I chose randomly languages (with the huge amount of weird ones like Fortran, Ada, Basic or Assembly ARM). It's gonna be fun xD Btw. Rust is my main language and I think you're going to love the simplicity and clarity of doing such challenges :P

[@U20E0]

Language suggestion: [C] ( and you actually have to use object-orientation as much as possible )

[@orizach01]

I did this in python with a bunch of splits and no regex