Turns out that 18 years ago, PHP had ~100 functions. The function names got put in a hash map. The hash function chosen? Strlen. Thus, the function names were chosen so the hash collisions would be minimized (by creating a uniform distribution of function name length). Which means the origin of all those insane and inconsistent names in PHP is even worse than I’d always thought. I am literally blown away. I can barely conceive of a more mind-shatteringly idiotic thing.

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