Re: [RFC] Scalar Type Hints v0.2

Hi Zeev, > On 15 Jan 2015, at 11:56, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote: > > Andrea, > > I'm not sure what you're basing that assumption on. The incidental > interactions you (or anybody) may have with 'the community', by no way > represent the opinion of the community at large. The vast majority of the > PHP community never ever interacts with internals@, never attend > conferences, don't write blog posts about PHP and are generally completely > 'under the radar'. I would actually go to argue that the people who do > attend conferences, participate on internals@ or write blog posts - are not > representative of the PHP userbase at large. The vast majority of > developers I bump into - you will never ever hear from. They constitute the > vast majority of the ~5M strong PHP developer base. > > So even though my belief / educated guess is that the vast majority of the > PHP userbase would prefer to see strict typing kept off this language, I'm > not going to argue that - but we must not argue the opposite either, based > on the non-representative anecdotal data from a few dozen people. Whether or not they are in the majority, a very large portion of PHP developers would prefer strict typing. In particular, the most vocal ones would seem to. There are also a lot of PHP developers who would prefer weak typing. Thus we have a problem: either approach to scalar hints will upset a large portion of the community. > >> Myself, I might have been somewhat happy with just weak hints, but >> it would upset an awful lot of developers who would like some measure of >> strict typing. Developers who would most likely not use the new scalar >> type >> hints, because they weren’t strict. And if nobody uses them, why add them? > > How do you deduce that 'nobody uses them' from the fact that some group of > people said they won't? I'm sorry, but it makes no sense, especially given > the positive feedback you saw on internals, making it clear that there would > be in fact people using it. Not all of it was positive. Sure, a lot of people would use them though, but I’ve heard quite a few developers say they wouldn’t use them and continue to use manual (!is_int($foo))-style assertions. > If there's one thing that's worse than introducing an alien concept like > strict typing into PHP, it's introducing it as a feature that will include > all the negatives of this alien concept, PLUS have the ability to radically > change how it behaves based on a runtime option. This isn’t a runtime option, it is entirely compile-time. Much like namespaces are not a runtime option. There isn’t even the ability to toggle it at runtime, unless we somehow add some ability to edit the flags on individual opcodes. Thanks. -- Andrea Faulds http://ajf.me/