Re: [RFC] Attributes v2

I would not expect someone who’s never written a line of code to understand attributes/decorators, just as I wouldn’t expect them to understand traits, interfaces, or really any of the things one should know about in order to write and maintain production-ready PHP code. If you want someone to get excited about programming, PHP is probably not the best language for them to start with. There are a ton of great interactive online tools (e.g. Glitch, CodePen) that make it easy to get started without having to worry about installing PHP or mastering the language’s syntax. > On Mar 9, 2020, at 9:48 PM, Mike Schinkel <mike@newclarity.net> wrote: > >  >> >> On Mar 9, 2020, at 9:36 PM, Matthew Brown <matthewmatthew@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Saying "the syntax makes my eyes bleed" is slightly useless feedback. > > That was just a header. There was elaboration right below it: > > "I find angle brackets extremely hard to read and fear — having trained many newbies in > programming — that it will cause newbies who see PHP to think it is too complex for them to > consider learning." > > And there was a proposed alternative. > >> You could say "it's hard to scan", but I don't even think that's >> true – prepending everything << makes it easy to pick out attributes in plain text at a >> glance, > > Not for me. Seeing the word "attributes" is far easier for me than seeing > "<<" and ">>." > > I do of course understand YMMV. > >> Additionally this syntax has effectively been battle-tested at scale already in PHP-like >> codebases – thousands of engineers at Facebook and Slack have used it over the last few years, and >> been productive with it. > > Yeah, developers who have been vetted by two very successful tech companies. > > Something tells me neither of them hire moderately-to-lower skilled developers who work in the > trenches at many non high-flying tech companies, nor do they hire newbies who are trying to decide > if they should learn PHP, or learn Javascript/Typescript instead (for example.) > > Just registering my objection to the syntax and proposing a readable alternative. I would be > highly surprised if there were not many others in userland who would feel the same. But of course I > unfortunately have no way of validating that belief. > > -Mike