On 08/08/2019 21:17, Zeev Suraski wrote:
[... and not in the Sith Lord kind of way.]
Thoughts?
I'm going to speak strictly as a userland PHP developer, for that is
what I am.
The idea of PHP being held hostage to eternal backwards compatibility
fills me with absolute dread.
I've built most of my career on PHP, I find it a very powerful platform,
but I find it lacking in some major areas. Some of those have reasonable
workarounds (React, Swoole) and some of them do not (var level type
enforcement, generics, universal annotations, first class functions and
other symbols, union types, CoW classes etc).
I hope that some day, these problems are going to be fixed, but in the
process I understand they may pose backwards compatibility issues.
If PHP as a language cannot push forwards out of a concern for perpetual
backwards compatibility, then I have to start questioning if it makes
sense for me, and those I work with, to continue using it in the long
run, vs a platform which is willing to find a way to make those changes
and push things forward. I'm thinking 5 - 10 years here.
As a developer, having to spend time on fixing BC breaks is obviously a
cost. However, not having things that would have saved me time, or
allowed me to write better code if they were there, but weren't added
because of BC, is also a cost.
To my mind, I would be happy to see a situation where I can stick a
declare in my file that says "Give me the good stuff and I will find a
way to deal with the BC breaks".
I can deal with short term pain for long term gain.
What I would struggle to deal with is committing myself and my clients
to a language and ecosystem where history was constantly allowed to
trump pragmatism.
I understand it's obviously a big challenge for the internals team and
its contributors to create coexistent systems with versioning, but I
would simply offer the following:
If you're not going forward, you're falling behind, and sometimes going
forward requires sacrifice.
Mark Randall
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