I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.
That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.
Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.
If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.
Exactly. The type system was never built for anything even slightly more complex. Its basically annotations for primitive types and classes. PHP has always had an weak type system, so adding generics will most likely never happen.
> Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy
PHP has really only one collection datatype (the infamous array), so having generics would be tremendously useful, as an example you cant return an typed array from a function, witch is just really bad.
For an counter example, Python managed to do this, while also being a dynamic language, although having a stronger typing than PHP.
“Actually, one of the most notoriously conservative and simple (in feature set) languages is really super complex and has evolved a ton because it has _Generic and varargs now, and __packed__ exists as a compiler feature.”
And to further double down, that minor evolution is over 36 years (arguably a decade longer, but I’m being generous with your argument). Not the 12-16 years (depending which 5 point release you wanna start with) that PHP has morphed into an entirely different language.
But, if you want an answer to your question:
You can learn to avoid undefined behavior in about 30 seconds.
If you're purposefully fiddling with undefined behavior, it's because (ideally) you're A) an advanced developer and you know exactly what you're trying to achieve (and inspecting the generated code) and/or B) you're using a specific compiler and don't plan on porting your code elsewhere.
And I would double down on my bet regarding ISO C related questions, as I have met a few folks that contrary to myself as language nerd, hardly know what is written there or have even opened the PDF drafts at least once in their life.
PHP chose to check types at runtime. To check that a value is really an array<int> the runtime could have to loop through the entire array. All the types PHP currently implements are simple and cheap to check. For more elaborate cases you need an offline checker like PHPstan and comment-based type annotations. (PHPstan catches 99% of issues before the runtime gets to it so for my own code I'd prefer the Python approach with its cleaner syntax.)
The runtime checking seems the key difference, not so much the historical strength of the type system. Python's language implementation does very little typechecking itself and PHP's third-party offline typecheckers are respectably advanced.
I have no clue what the future brings for PHP, but PHP 8 is definitely a good start, and we should put PHP 5 to rest.
PHP 10 might not be that different from PHP 8 for all I know.
We do not know if there will be "constant change". Out of curiosity, what programming language do you use that you also love?
FWIW, if by "constant change" you mean improvements or bug fixes, then I do not see why we should not have those. I do not even mind breaking backwards compatibility if the reasons for breaking justifies it, but it has to be a really good reason.
non of the "modern" things are particularly taxing to teach someone with more than two braincells. If they don't understand them then they haven't kept up with ANY programming trends in the past decade and are best placed infront of the TV with an iPad than left to mess with the possible critical infrastructure of a business.
#[SkipDiscovery(static function (Container $container): bool {
return ! $container->get(Application::class) instanceof ConsoleApplication;
})]
final class BlogPostEventHandlers
{ /* … */ }
The only one that's caused me any significant stress is the deprecation of the old `mysql` DB interface; I had to refactor a whole bunch of code for that, since I'm maintaining a codebase that's been in continuous use & development since 2001.
The additions to PHP since 5 add more things you can do, but they don't really change the simple things you can do to first learn PHP. You can still just create a .php file and start interspersing HTML and <?php script tags with basic operations.
Why is it bad?
In particular, why is it worse than not being able to declare a typed array in your current scope? (I understand the basic argument in favor of typed arrays, but I also understand why PHP would choose not to go that route; I'm not sure I see how it's worse to not be able to return one from a function, given that they don't exist elsewhere.)
Given that the cat effectively is out of the bag, does the example on the release page (sneak preview) make more sense to you: https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#closures-in-const-ex...?
> As a side note, even PHP's official wiki cannot highlight correctly the multiline attributes behind a "#"
Yes, unfortunately the off-the-shelf software of the Wiki uses a custom-built highlighter instead of the `highlight_string()` function that is bundled with PHP: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.highlight-string.php
This could be the way PHP could go, they just need the lexer to handle types, and not do any runtime checking at all.
But i guess that goes against what the php devs want, but it sounds so wasteful, to typecheck the same code time after time even if it passed some sort of initial "compile time step".
A even more simpler example is An array of some sort of Item. I cant return array(Item), but i only can return an array.
Yes array is the evil collection type of everything, but that's how it's meant to work. Array is the quick and dirty 'throw everything in there' thing. PHP has classes and they're very full featured and offer lots of type safety - use those.
But PHP 5 was released 21 years ago and is unsupported. Companies using it are putting their customers at risk.