Home / Blog

The DX Files: Abandon Anonymous Arrays of Attributes

Posted on Tue, Aug 12, 2008 by Barry Jaspan
Barry Jaspan's picture

This is part three of my series, The DX Files: Improving Drupal Developer Experience. This time, I’m suggesting changing some of Drupal’s most basic data structures and APIs by replacing anonymous arrays with well-defined data structures. I fully expect lots of disagreement.

read more

Tags: 
Drupal
Drupal
acquia
acquia
developer experience
dx

Comments

Posted on by Rainer Feike (not verified).

I disagree!

Anonymous arrays is a great way to do things quick and dirty. If I want type-safe and well defined (in academic means) code, I use JAVA not PHP. If I want to get a quick result I use Drupal not JSF.

Why change that?

And - changing basic data structures will make lot's of written and tested code unusable. That would be a step to kick Drupal out of serious IT business.

Posted on by Tj Holowaychuk (not verified).

"some of Drupal’s most basic data structures"

What did you have in mind? I am sure I would agree with some, although we could refactor core for the next 2 years and still have tons of work to do.