11–20 of 186 posts
Phpstan deals well with type definitions, arrays are powerful enough to contain whatever needed, and functions can be stored and passed around easily enough.
if("0") {} being equivalent to if(false) {} still gives me nightmares even though I've stopped using PHP for at least 6 years now :)
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- PHP has `SplFixedArray`[^1] that work similar to the standard arrays you expect from other languages. SPL extension is always available in PHP 5.3+, it is not even possible to compile PHP without it anymore. There is no specific type for list-arrays and associative arrays, but there is an `array_is_list` function to quickly check it.
- For typed properties, if a property is not typed, it is effectively considered `mixed $var = null`. If the property is typed, and has no default value, then it is considered uninitialized, and not allowed to access.
If you're accessing an uninitialized property or checking if a property is uninitialized, you're probably already doing something wrong.
The point of class properties with no default value is that you're supposed to set them either in the constructor, immediately after creating an instance, or via some other method that guarantees they'll have a value by the time you need to read them (such as deserialization with validation).
If you want your properties to have a default "unset" value that you can trivially check for, that's what null is for. The author doesn't make it clear whether they are aware that you can declare a nullable string and give it the default value of null, but I hope they are.
Surprisingly enough, I was more productive in PHP than I was in perl. Perhaps perl is even stranger than PHP.
Every time I work in another language I miss PHP’s arrays.
After over two decades of working in PHP, I'm now working in Java. PHP is basically Java-lite. I am absolutely loving the compile-time safety of Java, but I dearly miss PHP's maps and arrays. In Java, the amount of verbosity for defining a map/list and operating on it is overwhelming. Modern PHP is great. Many powerful language features, excellent performance, great community and package ecosystem, and decent enough…
I heard this a long time ago about perl. CPAN is great.
Well ... perl entered the fossilized era. I think people do not really observe things correctly. I am noticing the same with ruby right now - everyone sees that ruby is in decline, very strongly so, in the last 3 years. Yet you have blog posts such as "ruby is not dying - it is aging like fine wine". And these are all NOT BASED ON FACTUAL ANALYSIS. I still think ruby is a great language, but if people are not realistic in their assessment of a situation, what does this tell us about people's evaluation in general? People seem to shy away from criticism. You can see this on reddit too, where moderators ban and censor willy-nilly, or even on github, where you can also quickly get eliminated for not conforming to xyz. It's as if some people are very afraid of strong opinions. I don't understand why - an opinion that is objectively false, can be shown to be false.
Doing so now raises a deprecation warning, unless you add #[AllowDynamicProperties], and PHP 9 will convert it to an error. I'm told this will simplify internals and unlock optimizations.
Arrays are still fairly awful, but generics may become a reality sooner rather than later, and on that could be built Vec and Dict types, à la Hack. PHP is going to be stuck with arrays as they are now for forever, but they'll at least become optional for new code.