[RossM]

Zend the organisation, is probably what Marco meant when referring to poor stewardship, instead of the OS project Zend Framework.

I like Hack because it explicitly doesn't support[0] a bunch of cruft from PHP. It feels a lot to me like the BC-breaking PHP.next people want - easy to switch to for modern applications, but not hindered by supporting PHP 4 code. Bit early to start pointing fingers at it's future though.

[0]: http://docs.hhvm.com/manual/en/hack.unsupported.php

[jimhart3000]

> Writing list(, $b) = array(3,4) is not allowed. Instead use $_, i.e.: list($_, $b) = array(3, 4).

Not that I think the former is good practice at all, but isn't the latter a kind of weird use of what is a valid variable name?

[wting]

Using _ as a throwaway variable name is idiomatic in Python, Haskell, and Go. Looks like they're pushing the same idiom in Hack, which I'm ok with.

[agumonkey]

AFAIK in Haskell it's not a throwaway variable, a pattern with _ will not create a binding at all. I don't think Python does this, maybe Go.

[MBlume]

Python doesn't have language support for the idiom -- trying to evaluate

lambda _, _: None

gives

SyntaxError: duplicate argument '_' in function definition

but tools like pylint will silence unused-variable warnings if the variable starts with '_'.

[agumonkey]

Thanks for the verification. But even a bit of syntactic convention won't be enough if python create a unnecessary binding.

[wycats]

And Ruby, and Rust. It's close to universal.

[wtetzner]

And Clojure.

[underwater]

It is a variable, not a language construct. The docs are just recommending `$_` as a convention over something like `$temp`.