One of the things i really like about working where i do are the hallway conversations i get into. This morning i bumped into someone i used to work with frequently and is best described as the Company Crumudgeon (i have no idea what title i secretly carry, but i suspect it's "Homocidal Lunatic").
We got into a brief discussion about PHP5 and whether or not it's worth the hoopla. My opinion is that it does address the issue that everyone insists on treating PHP as a scripting language however i'm not really in favor of the direction it's taking. The Crumudgeon brought up a really good point in that if anything PHP should be more standard (e.g. normalize the various embedded function names, so you don't have stuff like array_sort and natsort co-existing. Rename them to arraysort,natsort or array_sort, nat_sort), yank out the stuff that can't be thrown into loadable shared libraries, and just make the language simpler.
i can't argue with that. We've already got lots of languages for handling complex issues, they're called C, C++ and any other binary compiled language that you like. PHP has a wonderful thunking layer that lets you easily marshall info back and forth.
The funny thing is that i see the same thing happening in PHP as will happen with Perl and has happened with C. The Next Generation isn't an expansion of the existing language, it's a replacement of it. In effect, a group has hijacked it. (i'll note that in the case of Perl 6 it's the guy that originally created the language, but the point is still valid).
These are, for all intents and purposes, new languages.
Think about it, with C++ you can write programs using old C styles, but they're horribly inefficient and prone to breaking. Likewise if you write only C++ you're not going to be able to write a C program since you won't have objects, frameworks or most of the things you've grown used to using.
The only problem with hijacking a language like PHP or Perl 5 is the fact that it replaces the older, equally valid one. That's a serious issue when the syntax isn't similar and the scripts aren't backwards compatible, because Hosting companies have to pick one language over another and get stuck between the "Gotta have the new toys!" and "Gotta have a site that works!" groups.
i'm still not looking forward to PHP: the Next Generation. As far as i'm concerned, it's overkill. i've got my list of things i'd like to change about the current version of PHP, but they're all backwards compatible, and executing script friendly. (Ok, changing the default behavior to pass array references by default rather than copy them might screw up a few scripts, but i'm willing to bet it's not really that many). i won't deny that there's demand for an improved version of the language, and that's fine, go create one. Perl and Python are equally compelling.
Plus, i liked no budget Kirk better than high budget Picard.
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