Posted by Wayne on 12/21/05 02:00

On 20 Dec 2005 13:52:17 -0800, "Chung Leong"
<chernyshevsky@hotmail.com> wrote:

>I guess I'm not the only one who's unhappy about the direction that PHP
>is going. It's larger issue that goes beyond backward compatibility. I
>see it as a conflict between two points of view: an academic's vs. an
>engineer. An engineer sees a problem and tries to solve it. The
>outcome is what matters, while aesthetics and principles are secondary.

I don't agree that an engineer's don't care for aesthetics! In fact,
the products with the best aesthetics are often considered good
engineering.

But I do see a conflict between "solving a problem" and doing it "the
PHP way". I loved the early years of PHP (after switching from ASP)
because each new revision would include some feature I desperately
wanted in the previous version. There were solving problems as fast
as I was coming up with them.

Lately, things have been leaning away from solving problems and more
towards to trying to do things "the PHP way" -- whatever that is. For
example, I want type-hints for all the variable types so I don't have
to double check the parameters to my functions are, for example,
actually integers! That would be USEFUL! But that feature is ignored
because it's not "PHP like".. what the hell. So we have to write
type-checking code over and over because they don't want to pollute
the language with a useful feature? That's far from the only example.

I think PHP5 was a good step in the right direction in principle. We
need the features that it provides. But then there's lots of
overengineering going on as well -- especially with respect to the
built-in classes; there's a dozen different iterator types but I've
never used a single one of them -- and I haven't seen any code that
does either. What problem is all this code trying to solve?

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