Good to see. It's about time PHP got forked even if experimentally.
It seems to me that you could fix a lot of the problems with PHP by breaking backwards compatibility.
It seems to me that you could fix a lot of the problems with PHP by breaking backwards compatibility.
Just a short list I can think of now:
- Short array syntax. Completely optional but would clean up the language quite a bit. This has been proposed several times and shot down each for no real good reason.
- Promote complex primitives into objects. With the proper interfaces it wouldn't break any old code. Once this is done, deprecate the myriad of str* and array* functions in favor of the object methods. This also cleans up the "what order do i pass in the args" problem that so many people cite.
- Named parameters. Gets rid of passing in default params or an array blob for functions/methods that take lots of optional params. It also opens up the way for DSLs.
- Replace PEAR with something better. The quality of PEAR modules is really low and PEAR always seems to be broken one way or another.
- Add a list and hash type. PHP's array is very slow for some cases, and sometimes you need to enforce the datatype you're working with.
- Use exceptions for errors. Could be a runtime flag to prevent breaking things. It's incredibly easy to write bad code because PHP make it easy to ignore problems. Things like functions that connect to the db or trying to retrieve data from a stream don't throw exceptions on error.
I'm not saying it wouldn't be a good thing but those functions are one of the defining features of PHP imho
http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/hw8da/php_fork_based_on...
Specific errors should throw specific exceptions. That way I can handle the ones I know how to handle and let the others bubble up and either completely break the app to be logged and fixed later or get handled correctly somewhere else. With ErrorException, you have to look at the contents of the error message to see if it's an error you can handle or need to rethrow.
I don't think it's the syntax that's forgiving as much as the type coercion. JavaScript is actually more forgiving syntax wise, for example - PHP throws a fatal error when a semicolon is missing at the end of a line, JS interpreters fill it in. Unlike PHP, though it will throw a ReferenceError and die upon referencing any undefined value. PHP just coerces that to something falsey... they'll both die trying to call undefined functions or methods.
I don't see how PHP is not more readable than Python or Ruby, either. There's really nothing about the language itself that makes it readable or better for beginners.
The docs are definitely good, I agree. I think they need to do something about the outdated and not-so-well curated comments on each entry though.
Near ubiquity is good, but it also makes a lot of good PHP resources get lost in horrible noise. WordPress, for instance - if you search to solve anything, you find scores of outdated tutorials offering solutions to problems which have been solved by the official branch for years. Then, you find more blogs blog-spamming the incorrect solution... so it's actually easier to search for and find Rails or Django help, in my experience. A large percentage of the PHP code out there is notably terrible, for whatever reasons.
The 'interpolation' would be called templating. You can do this in most languages (erb for Ruby, for example) but it's not always considered a good idea to give the template language logic capabilities. It happens that this is the default for how PHP and Apache work together, and I think the straightforward concepts of files, directories, scripts it's easier for beginners to understand and work with than framework style URL routing.
The large software eco-system centered around tools consumers use such as WordPress or joomla has helped PHP grow.
Set up is easy, but the majority of PHP users probably never set up their own Linux boxes with Apache anyhow. If they wanted to, though it would be easier than say, Django since last I checked Ubuntu was still providing Django .96 packages.
The ease of setup comes from every shared host offering PHP and MySQL. If they all offered Python, Django and Postgres support, with cpanel configs and PhpPgAdmin or the like, people would magically find Django really easy to set up. That's just how it goes when you have lots of market share.
Simply type in hello world in a file, save it and run it as PHP script. It will print "hello world". And that was the start of the good things.
php itself does break backwards compatibility, and it doesnt really help.