PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
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PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
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Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#2PHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest similar to what happened with JavaScript a few decades ago.
A language that's easy to make fun of but widely used is an attractive target for improvement.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#3PHP, since version 7.0, has been a much improved language since when many people started hating on it. They have been consistently moving the spec forward and making improvements. It's not perfect, but no language really is after all. It is really nice just seeing issues that have been around for a long time being addressed and fixed.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#4PHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest similar to what happened with JavaScript a few decades ago. A language that's easy to make fun of but widely used is an attractive target for improvement.
Maybe I'm not in the right circles but I see absolutely no renewed interest towards PHP. Is there any reason to believe that? Honest question - PHP was my first language (or second if you want to consider mIRC scripting) and I have not so bad memories but at least me and everybody I know moved away from it years ago and don't see people going back to it anytime soon.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#5PHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest similar to what happened with JavaScript a few decades ago. A language that's easy to make fun of but widely used is an attractive target for improvement.
The Laravel framework (https://laravel.com) and its growing ecosystem and welcoming community is a great example of this renaissance.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#6PHP is seeing a renascence and renewed interest similar to what happened with JavaScript a few decades ago. A language that's easy to make fun of but widely used is an attractive target for improvement.
I don't think PHP _needs_ a renascence. It's already a widely used language, so I prefer it to keep growing the good parts and leaving behind the bad old habits.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#7PHP, since version 7.0, has been a much improved language since when many people started hating on it. They have been consistently moving the spec forward and making improvements. It's not perfect, but no language really is after all. It is really nice just seeing issues that have been around for a long time being addressed and fixed.
I have to confess that I have a lot of prejudice against PHP after having to work with it at the time of PHP3 and 4. It seemed like even worse than Perl in the sense of how many things were just bolted on it as a way that the developers could claim "yeah, you can do that with PHP". After having a blog running wordpress hacked twice by mere virtue of being online, I dismissed it for good.
I keep hearing about how the language has improved, but to me it feels like even if the language gets rid of all its heaps of crap, it still is in a evolutionary dead-end. Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?
(Edit: I never had something downvoted so fast before. This is not concern trolling. I seriously would like to know if it makes sense for a non-PHP developer to look into it)
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#8If the JIT for PHP ever becomes good enough it solves the memory leak problems PHP to this day is still plagued with, that might be enough to convince me to use PHP again, possibly, for some workloads.
I can't help but feel that PHPs popularity is mostly tied to Wordpress, and to a lesser extend Laravel (with Symfony coming in behind that).
Not really sure the rest of the ecosystem even matters, outside those core pieces. I'd love to see it fix alot of landstanding issues, and I love that the language has moved forward. I've worked with it professionally over the last few years in various places, and I don't particularly dislike so called "modern" PHP, but its only really good at very specified problem domains (mostly, you have a website, need to display said website. I always had scaling problems for anything other than using it in the context of a template language or very straightfoward database access. Real time APIs? nope. Just couldn't get it done, too much memory pressure)
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#9PHP is damn good in certain areas.
It is one of the best choices (if not the best choice) for rapid prototyping of a program. Its damn fast to similar alternatives (Python, Ruby, Dart, JavaScript), and the standard library is huge.
It does have footguns. I am not a fan of the loose typing, but you can take some steps to mitigate. You can do "===", "strict_types" and type hinting for function input and output. It is similar to C in that the language itself doesnt really do much to stop you from writing bad code. Also the function naming is not consistent, and even function arguments are not consistent. However PHP 8 will help with that somewhat, as you can now do named arguments.
Also PHP has the best language documentation I have ever seen. I would prefer more examples, but its well above some other languages.
Re: PHP 8.0.0 beta 2
#10If the JIT for PHP ever becomes good enough it solves the memory leak problems PHP to this day is still plagued with, that might be enough to convince me to use PHP again, possibly, for some workloads. I can't help but feel that PHPs popularity is mostly tied to Wordpress, and to a lesser extend Laravel (with Symfony coming in behind that). Not really sure the rest of the ecosystem even matters, outside those core pi…
What are the memory leak problems?
I was under the impression that PHP's stateless nature, with a whole new instance of everything coming into being for each request, somewhat sidesteps the capacity for problematic memory leaks that could otherwise exist for processes that remain alive between requests.