> That would help, I would argue, with killing many of the PHP-specific criticisms I don't see why appeasing critics should be the goal of PHP. Removing $ and

> That would help, I would argue, with killing many of the PHP-specific criticisms I don't see why appeasing critics should be the goal of PHP. Removing $ and ; signs doesn't help me at all. I actually like the "$" sign. Maybe little bit less ;, but I don't really notice it. But I would certainly notice the mess of splitting language syntax into two separate branches. Breaking changes in language are not fun to address and take away the time from building features. I would be a lot more happy with generics. Or scalar objects, something like: $string = "abc"; var_dump($string->length()); // int(3) var_dump($string->startsWith("a")); // bool(true) https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects That would make PHP standard library a lot easier and fun to use.