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Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

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Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#41

Post by echelon »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31
ThomWilhelm3 wrote: post #27

I always wonder why PHP never seems to favour making breaking changes to keep things cleaner, if you aren't going to improve language constructs in a major version, when will they be cleaned up?

I think that post Python 3 nobody is going to do that. It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though. Something that was easy to use for the person doing occaisional web work or beginner but without the traps and pitfalls.

Python 3 attempted too much change at once. The Python folks could have spread incremental rollout of the changes across several major version numbers and probably not have faced such slow adoption.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#42

Post by tonyedgecombe »

echelon wrote: post #41
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that post Python 3 nobody is going to do that. It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though. Something that was easy to use for the person doing occaisional web work or beginner but without the traps and pitfalls.

Python 3 attempted too much change at once. The Python folks could have spread incremental rollout of the changes across several major version numbers and probably not have faced such slow adoption.

I thought the problem was carrying on support for 2.xx too long. Some people will never move on unless they are forced to.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#44

Post by oaiey »

pansa2 wrote: post #40
thaumaturgy wrote: post #7

I'm ambivalent. There's a tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of…

> There's a tension in PHP-land between [...] hobbyist-hacker [vs] enterprise-scale IMO the same tension exists in Python. The hobbyist-hackers are using the language to write small-ish scripts, and the enterprise-scale developers are working on million-line codebases. Unfortunately for the hobbyist-hackers, at some point (perhaps when the BDFL started working at Dropbox), the focus of the language shifted from the f…

I would argue that has a strong correlation with the fact that universities are now teaching Python instead of Java. Once that alumni hits the job market, hobbyist-hackers are no longer the majority of users.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#45

Post by matsemann »

Not sure if the standard library has evolved since my PHP days, but this would at least solve the "key / haystack" issue. In which lots of the standard library had different orders in which parameters are passed. One can finally pass them named and no longer have to care about the order. This may also have been solved by better tooling since then, though.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#46

Post by jonplackett »

This was my favourite thing about learning Swift. I hadn’t used a named argument language before. It feels very relaxing knowing that the compiler can check all these things for you. I haven’t used php for years but it’s cool to see it adopting this. Maybe I’ll give it another go!

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#47

Post by nikic »

ThomWilhelm3 wrote: post #27

I always wonder why PHP never seems to favour making breaking changes to keep things cleaner, if you aren't going to improve language constructs in a major version, when will they be cleaned up?

PHP 8 has plenty of breaking changes (https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/08e6c209550a268500bbdef4...), mostly in the department of throwing errors more aggressively, and fixing some long-standing "features" (like 0 == "foobar" being true). But there's a budget to this, and you have to strike a balance between how much code you break and what benefit you get out it.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#49

Post by stareatgoats »

sildur wrote: post #19
stareatgoats wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and basically nobody does that anyway. That's it, I'm officially a nobody :-)

> leaves it up to the called function to sanity-check the input types instead of letting the compiler do it, and basically nobody does that anyway. You don’t check the input types?

You're reading the sentence incorrectly: "and basically nobody does that anyway", means the preceding type checking argument you refer to is moot. So I insist, I am a nobody (according to this definition).

Btw I don't always sanity check the parameters, mostly at the system edges only.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#50

Post by Denvercoder9 »

slifin wrote: post #35

The fact it errors if you over supply the function arguments is a bit worrying Adding a key to an array shouldn't be a breaking change, if you over supply a function by position today PHP doesn't error

> if you over supply a function by position today PHP doesn't error

I'd argue that this it the worrying part. How often do you intentionally supply an extra argument, and how often is it an accident? I'd take the warning.

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