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Is it too late to explain to the PHP designers that PHP is a huge success, and that much of the reason for its success is that, for all its faults, it is not ov

Is it too late to explain to the PHP designers that PHP is a huge success, and that much of the reason for its success is that, for all its faults, it is not over-designed? I guess the Java envy is strong. But why would I want to read and write ersatz Java, or ersatz Ruby, when I could use the real thing?

nolok 15y ago
PHP is neither ersatz Java nor ersatz Ruby, and traits are clearly not in "over design" territory. I can understand people not liking the language but then why do you keep coming back complaining that they add user-requested features to it ... You complain that it damage PHP's simplicity but the truth is that if you don't want to use it, don't use it. NOTHING is forcing you to use it, it uses its own keywords so it won't confuse you or change existing code ... And if someone somewhere wants to use it to do meta programming, I don't see how that affects anyone else's approach to php.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  NOTHING is forcing you to use it This is the perennial argument of the feature addict, but it isn't really true. I suppose you can ignore core language features if you never read or fix any code but your own. But in a few years this new stuff is likely to start cropping up in the source code of Drupal modules and Wordpress themes and the PHP frameworks, and if that happens there will be little choice but to deal with it. The bigger problem is PHP contributor resources. When you add a core feature, that feature needs to be supported forever. The time you spend supporting it is time you could have spent fixing other things. Worse, the effect is nonlinear: Each new feature potentially interacts with all existing features, increasing your surface area for bugs. In extreme cases, you approach an event horizon where you can no longer ship anything. The painful thing about the latter effect is that it happens even if the new feature almost never gets used. One might end up doing 20% more QA and maintenance to support 0.1% of one's customers. You are absolutely right in one sense: If one simply abandons PHP altogether one need never deal with it again. The thought has occurred to me. Pity about the hundreds of thousands of existing customers, though.
  - nolok 15y ago
    Then I don't understand why you complain about traits, since they are actually reducing the amount of support and code replication everywhere (unless the code using traits is a piece of crap to start with, but then you probably shouldn't depend on that). Not adding painfully needed features such as traits and closures (which got similar comments before that) just because it would make life harder for those who don't enjoy/want to code in php anymore would in my opinion be a bad thing.

nolok 15y ago

PHP is neither ersatz Java nor ersatz Ruby, and traits are clearly not in "over design" territory. I can understand people not liking the language but then why do you keep coming back complaining that they add user-requested features to it ... You complain that it damage PHP's simplicity but the truth is that if you don't want to use it, don't use it. NOTHING is forcing you to use it, it uses its own keywords so it won't confuse you or change existing code ... And if someone somewhere wants to use it to do meta programming, I don't see how that affects anyone else's approach to php.

mechanical_fish 15y ago
NOTHING is forcing you to use it This is the perennial argument of the feature addict, but it isn't really true. I suppose you can ignore core language features if you never read or fix any code but your own. But in a few years this new stuff is likely to start cropping up in the source code of Drupal modules and Wordpress themes and the PHP frameworks, and if that happens there will be little choice but to deal with it. The bigger problem is PHP contributor resources. When you add a core feature, that feature needs to be supported forever. The time you spend supporting it is time you could have spent fixing other things. Worse, the effect is nonlinear: Each new feature potentially interacts with all existing features, increasing your surface area for bugs. In extreme cases, you approach an event horizon where you can no longer ship anything. The painful thing about the latter effect is that it happens even if the new feature almost never gets used. One might end up doing 20% more QA and maintenance to support 0.1% of one's customers. You are absolutely right in one sense: If one simply abandons PHP altogether one need never deal with it again. The thought has occurred to me. Pity about the hundreds of thousands of existing customers, though.
- nolok 15y ago
  Then I don't understand why you complain about traits, since they are actually reducing the amount of support and code replication everywhere (unless the code using traits is a piece of crap to start with, but then you probably shouldn't depend on that). Not adding painfully needed features such as traits and closures (which got similar comments before that) just because it would make life harder for those who don't enjoy/want to code in php anymore would in my opinion be a bad thing.