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PHP 8.5
51–60 of 197 posts
Re: PHP 8.5
#52PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for…
This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....
C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.
If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
Re: PHP 8.5
#53PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for…
Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though.
I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.
Re: PHP 8.5
#54PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for…
PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.
If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-... or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45.
TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
Re: PHP 8.5
#55Official release notes: https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php
Re: PHP 8.5
#56PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow. I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for…
PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.
It has nothing to do with being “too hard”, and everything to do with not making sense to the type system. PHP is weakly-typed and heavily reflection-based (so everything is aware of it’s and each other’s type at all times).
Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.
Re: PHP 8.5
#57tl;dr: nothing interesting, just stability and maturity
And a pipe operator, which is also being discussed in a number of other languages.
It seems that pipe operator was introduced largely because PHP arrays and strings don't have "methods". You can't write something in "OOP" style: "some_string"->str_replace("some", "replacement")->strtoupper(). With PHPs array / string procedural way writing such chains is much bulkier. Pipe operator will somewhat reduce the boilerplate, but the native "OOP" style is still much better.
Although there is a proposal for adding "methods" but I don't remember the link.
I'm not a blind PHP hater, but it seems like PHP community members sometimes celebrate new PHP features when their equivalents have been there for many years in other programming languages. https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab...
Re: PHP 8.5
#58A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it. My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack ( https://www.bookstackapp.com/ ), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great. But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on we…
> A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. How so?
Vanity, it's "PersonalHomePage" language
Re: PHP 8.5
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....
I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5 That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax. Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowl…
And what exactly 9-5 has to do with caring for coding or time investment in language learning?
Re: PHP 8.5
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate. PHP has an operator for something you should never do in a sane codebase. You know that python wants good good to look good? PHP was written in a way that makes bad code look good. And if we want Software Engineering to be a serious field that evolves, we have to be able to be…
You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @. Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.
This.
One common use case for the @ operator, is when "destructuring" array members into variables. In some cases, you can't know if the member will be available, but it's not important if it's missing. In that case, you can silence the warning.
$array = ['apple', 'pear']; @list($mainFruit, $secondaryFruit, $tertiaryFruit);
Since I suppress the warning that would occur due to the third member not being present, the program will continue executing instead of halting.