Hi Andi,

> On 5 Feb 2015, at 23:57, Andi Gutmans <a...@zend.com> wrote:
> 
> The folks who really want all this great strict typing should head over to 
> Oracle.com and download free open-source Java? I hear it's got a lot of 
> strict typing features in it. Only downside is that it'll take them 10x 
> longer to complete their projects. OK sorry. Had to say that :) I realize 
> it's not the same…

I don’t think it’s terribly funny to tell a large portion of the PHP community 
to go away.

> Andrea, while I don't agree with what you say I accept it. *But* exactly for 
> the reasons you state (the big divide) we should also have a weak type 
> hinting option to vote for in parallel. If you feel morally unable to do that 
> then I can copy your work and just have another RFC running in parallel but I 
> think that would do a disservice to the good work you've done.

No, I don’t think that’s fair. I’d be against holding a vote on strict types 
only for the same reason: the community is divided. Letting one side “win" is 
simply unfair on everyone else.

To quote myself in the Scalar Type Hints thread, here’s a rough tally of who 
was in favour of what in the v0.1 thread (I think “yourself” was Zeev in that 
context):

> On 15 Jan 2015, at 14:51, Andrea Faulds <a...@ajf.me> wrote:
> 
> Let’s have a look. From a quick skim over the thread for v0.1:
> 
> * In favour of weak types (or the RFC anyway): Adam, Stas, yourself, Jordi, 
> Pierre,
> * Against, in favour of strict types: Maxime, Nikita, Markus, Marco, Leigh, 
> Levi, Sven(?)
> * In favour of strict types, not against weak types as compromise: Matthew
> * Somewhat in favour: Sebastian
> * In favour of allowing both approaches: Marcio, Thomas, Marco
> 
> I apologise if I am misrepresenting anyone’s position.
> 
> This is unlikely to be super-representative of the PHP community. However, 
> I’m not sure I’d say “overwhelmingly positive”. It can be easy to get 
> confirmation bias when reading RFC threads.
> 
> It is very clear to me that a lot of people would like strict types, and some 
> people would like weak types. As to their relative numbers, I cannot say.
> 
> I don’t think it’s really fair to cover only the use case of one half of the 
> PHP community. The other half counts too. This is a rather divisive issue.

As is rather clear, there was no such consensus on internals. Confirmation bias 
can be a powerful thing, and it’s easy to forget that the number of messages 
doesn’t reflect the number of participants.

The views on other places were, from my experience, even more against weak 
types than internals. Internals seems to be the most pro-weak types PHP 
community I’m a part of.

Because of this schism, I really think it would be completely unfair to force 
through weak types. I know internals might like it (or some of internals, 
anyway), and I know you and Zeev certainly do, but it’s not as clear-cut in the 
wider community.

This isn’t some minor issue, either: it’s a very frequently resurfacing topic, 
and one which is particularly divisive. It’s not some minor syntax issue that 
merely holding a vote will solve.

--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/





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