Re: [RFC Proposal] var keyword deprecation/removal

wrote in message news:56DDEF7B.6080309@fleshgrinder.com...

On 3/7/2016 10:14 AM, Tony Marston wrote:

[...] Mind you, those languages were maintained by groups of competent professionals and not an army of chimpanzees.

I will not reply fully to your last message because it was yet again littered with personal insults and an extremely aggressive tone.

I disagree with your definition of "personal insult" and "aggressive tone". I could also accuse all the supporters of this BC break of having an aggressive tone, but that would be because of my delicate and sensitive nature. :)

I already complained earlier about your tone and I protest at this point again. Please read some code of conducts out there and maybe those that are currently being discussed to be added to PHP. Should you truly believe that I am a complete idiot (or chimpanzee), so be it, I can life with that. I will also refrain from listing all the time intervals I have spent with PHP and/or other languages. This is a professional talk and not a---excuse my french---dick-measuring contest. I for one enjoy the disagreement because we can all learn from each other. In Austria we have an idiom that says "Du kannst auch von einem Idioten etwas lernen," this boils down to "you can also learn something from an idiot". Just think about it, every person on this earth knows at least something you don't. Ergo, maybe just maybe you can learn something from the army of chimpanzees here.

The only thing I am learning here is that there are too many cooks spoiling the broth. There are too many people who want to change the language into something it was not meant to be. There are too many people who have this notion of language "purity" and "perfection" and want to force their personal views on the whole of the PHP development community. They don't care about all those BC breaks which prevent the quick take-up of new versions. When large organisations invest in their software applications they expect stability and longevity. By creating BC breaks with every new version of the language you are destroying those expectations and sending a message to millions of developers "Don't bother using this language as what you write today won't work in 5 year's time".

On 3/7/2016 1:27 PM, kelerest123@gmail.com wrote:

Change for the sake of change is bad, no argument there. Change for the

sake of progress is not and totally normal.

Can you please specify what kind of progress do see in the var keyword removal? I see only a BC break. Very best regards, Kubis Pandian-Fowler

The main reason in my opinion to go done this road till PHP 8 or 9 is simplification for users based on UI/UX research and a very few papers on language design (links and other material posted earlier). Duplication and exceptions in handling (e.g. argument order) result in various problems for users:

This has not been a problem so far for the millions of developers who have created millions of web sites and made PHP the number 1 language for the internet. If others have a problem then perhaps the problem is with them and not the language.

Just to name a few silly things that I encounter regularly. We even had some really evil example here in this thread were the _var_ keyword was used to indicate to a DIC that this property requires injection. After all it is about simplification of the language's interface.

It you can enhance the language without destroying existing functionality I will consider you to be a competent professional. -- Tony Marston