PHP becomes a complex language with each update. For what reason?
Its application is still limited to the web, mostly.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…
Still, even if it was "just" the web, why wouldn't it evolve? It's a great language, with a big user base, and there's always room for improvements and to increase the developer experience
The new array_first() and array_last() functions are nice, everything else is either reimplantation of existing features or "features"which will make maintainability more difficult. The pipe operator is one such example. I don't need it - these nested methods are not really an issue in any codebase I've seen. The new syntax only works for unary functions, so higher arity functions must be wrapped in an arrow function. It's a mess and more bug prone than just nesting the functions.
It's coming - but to get PHP RFCs to pass they have to be salami-sliced, otherwise they're voted down.
md5($password)
|> sha1(...)
|> sha1(...)
|> md5(...)
|> rot13(...)
|> crc32(...)Meanwhile it seemingly abandoned features and unique selling points, like the in-built templating, associative arrays with value semantics and the fact that it integrates well with C or the simple fact that it can be used to write web server scripts very easily. To me, many of these cool features have been largely ignored or even moved away from.
The problem is that the php project is maintained by (mostly) unsponsored contributors. There’s not a giant corporation behind it. Each of these new features are designed by a couple people (per rfc) and then discussed and voted by other contributors. The match keyword, for example, is consider as the future scope of this rfc which is still being worked on: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pattern-matching
Also, a lot of these half baked features are designed to be implemented in steps because of what I said in my other paragraph and to increase the odds of being accepted (it’s well known that it’s hard to get an rfc accepted and a lot of good ones haven’t been able to pass the voting phase).
When you consider this, it’s amazing that we get so much from so little.
What is your background? I've been working mostly with PHP and Python for about 25 years. Do you come from e.g. Java?
Now we have two syntax to be familiar with and maintain. And you just know the clowns are going to come along and convert one syntax to the other because they can, which completely ruins the git commit and you can't tell what actual functionally was changed at a glance. There will be bickering and bikeshedding about "modernizing" codebases.