just kill it

Posted Mar 24, 2010 19:07 UTC (Wed) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
In reply to: just kill it by b7j0c
Parent article: Resetting PHP 6

There are lots of things wrong with "PHP", but syntax is hardly one of them.

PHP syntax is far more expressive then, say, Java. And far less annoying then the sigi hell of Perl.

It sucks that the core libraries seem to have random parameter ordering. It sucks that there are a lot of brain-dead php apps out there. It sucks that there are a lot of brain-dead PHP coders out there. But syntax? That is the least of PHPs problems.

just kill it

Posted Mar 24, 2010 22:07 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]

The PHP syntax sucks, and I say that as someone who has worked with it
professionally since 2000. Saying that some other languages are worse is
irrelevant; by that kind of reasoning, PHP is perfect in every way because
some other language out there has surely done it all even worse.

PHP 5.3 namespace syntax? The fact that it _just_ finally got real
closures? Unknown identifiers are treated as strings? Function calls
can't be used in any general expression (e.g., foo()->bar() does not work,
but $tmp = foo(); $tmp->bar() does) ? No pass-by-name function parameters
(for no logical reason, just "it's not the PHP way") ? Type hinting for
objects and arrays only? Inconsistent special operator names?

Granted, you're right, the syntax is not PHP's biggest problem. The entire
implementation is its biggest problem. The compiler is crap, buggy,
unpredictable, and can't deal with any kind of failure (no way to catch and
gracefully fail on a parse error when including another file, for example).
The language is slow. The C API is hideous. Many of those syntax warts
are all but forced by the internal implementation, which itself grew out of
a lack of abstraction between the crappy original syntax and the runtime
engine.

If I were to do a PHP 6, it would be just a cleanup of the internals, all
deprecated APIs removed, and something very clean and easy to build upon so
that 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, etc. can start delivering at a higher quality.

That is basically what PHP 5 ended up being, and look how much life that
breathed into PHP.