Hacker News Reader

I don't see the benefit of this, it basically seems to strip out semicolons, dollar symbols and a different function syntax.. I suspect it's very limited (for example I see no object support, let alone traits, generators, etc) and could further complicate deployment. Can you summarise the benefits and strategic goals of the project?

View on HN

Assuming it continues to develop, I could see the appeal. When you consider how widely available PHP is and how one of the biggest complaints is the inconsistency in the design of the language, it makes sense to take advantage of a cleaner way to interact with the ecosystem.

This is what I was thinking. CoffeeScript wasn't just syntactical sugar, it was actually there to help instill best practices of JS.

Well I suppose this is very early days for the project, and syntax improvements have not been added as yet, but I see this as a worth-wild exercise if it does have some influence over php in the future like coffeescript did to the javascript world.

I think you judging it on a premature release. Maybe he is looking for your suggestions before going down the improvement path.

Also, they missed out on fixing possibly the second* silliest part of PHP: horrible inner functions.

* Edit: I just remembered PHP's "barewords".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com