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 featur

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.