RE: [PHP-DEV] [RESULT] [RFC] PHP 5.7

> De : yohgaki@gmail.com [mailto:yohgaki@gmail.com] De la part de Yasuo Ohgaki > > I thought there will be 5.7 and didn't pay much attention on this. Slow > transition is better than too fast. Slow transition is good, but, sometimes, it is too slow; I don't know if you remember how much time was necessary to stop backporting PHP5 patches to PHP4 ? The official reason was to make the migration slower and easier for our user base. Unfortunately, this was understood by several PHP software companies (no name here) as a signal that migrating their software to PHP5 was not so urgent and that they could sleep until PHP5 was stabilized. The only people who were actively working were PHP core developers, who had to stabilize PHP5 AND backport features to PHP4, wasting a lot of time and energy. Fortunately, most people backporting the patches were working for these companies :) The mistake we did, IMO, was to consider that new features were attractive enough to cause developers to speed up their migration. PHP5 was nice but OO already existed in PHP4 and most new features continued to be backported : no reason to speed up anything ! In this respect, I don't see much in PHP7 that will motivate our users to speed up their migration. Most features I see are uninteresting for at least 90% of our user base and even performance gains are hard to sell, let alone phpng, AST, or deprecated features :). The only feature I see that could be interesting from an end user point of view is named parameters but I don't know if it is still active. Another subject that could be very attractive is what I named 'pseudo-methods' (Nikita used the same term in his article). This is a way to provide an OO-like syntax applied to scalars, without loosing the benefits of loose typing, but solving the two main problems with functions : argument order and nested calls readability. Maybe I'll propose this feature but I am afraid of the reactions it could generate, as the trend seems to build a complex full-featured OO system and extend to scalars. I am totally opposed to this approach but it seems that's what most core dev want. My solution is much simpler, probably too simple for people hypnotized by java. The same for 'friend classes'. I won't even write the RFC as it seems it does not interest anyone. Strange because, googling around, it is visible that a lot of users are expecting this feature... Well, the feature list for PHP7 is not closed yet. I hope new attractive features will be added soon because, otherwise, it will be very hard to sell. And we need attractive features in the first release, not 7.1 or 7.2, which will never have the same exposure. Regards François