The new PHP

While the gist behind this post is right, the article contains a number of factual errors. E.g. the version numbers in the "language features" section are pretty messed up:

* Namespaces, closures and FPM were already in PHP 5.3

* The built-in web server was already in PHP 5.4

* Improved variadic functions, argument unpacking and phpdbg will be in PHP 5.6, which goes to beta in about a week.

> generators for simpler iteration, namespaces, and variadic functions and argument unpacking. With PHP 5.4, traits were introduced (a la Scala or Perl) to allow code reuse in single inheritance languages, as well as closures, which allow you to code PHP in a functional style.

"The new Java"

It's good to see PHP maturing. However sometimes the most important features of a language are the features you don't add. I think PHP would do itself a big favor by cleaning up its main APIs and standard library first. Maybe they will do that in PHP 6, since I doubt they want to break APIs in minor releases.

It really pains me that there are so many utter misunderstandings about modern PHP from people that used it years ago and have no clue about the current landscape, even in this thread.

Yes, the PHP core api is still a bit messy due to backward compatibility, but everything else it pretty awesome really. Please take a closer look if you haven't touched PHP in years, before you talk it down.

I'm a Drupal dev by trade, and I consider any day that I don't have to get into the guts of Drupal and write PHP a good day.

Recently, however, I had to get in there. This was a few days after I upgraded my local environment from 5.3 to 5.5. I've been writing Ruby for fun for a while now, and I love how I almost never have to look API related questions up, at least in comparison to PHP API questions. So I just wrote some PHP without looking up whether it was going to work, and it worked, first try. That rarely happens. Then I pushed it to dev, which is still on 5.3, and took the (dev) site down. Turns out the feature "array function dereferencing" is not available in 5.3, so I had to rewrite my code a little bit.

Point being, I could see myself liking PHP more when we move to 5.5 in all our environments.

All this is very true.

Modern PHP is not the PHP of yesteryear. With Composer for dependancy management and sticking to the PSR's you can build very stable, testable, and modern applications that change minds about PHP.

> It contains powerful new features and helpful developer tools, such as a built-in web server

I haven't finished the article yet, but really? Is that what PHP needs? A built-in web server? It strikes me that adding more tools that incompetent web developers can abuse is what got them there in the first place.

How long until we start having security releases for the PHP web server, because so many clueless devs decided to launch and run their site with it?

I sometimes ponder what I'd fix, given the chance, about PHP:

* Make the "stdout == response body" an explicit option, and make a rendering engine the default instead. Just sending all output is a senseless DEFAULT.

* Remove all the array_x functions and turn arrays into a class instead, and change the parameter order to be consistent across all the functions. A similar action could be done across many other classes of functions, too.

* Tighten equivalence requirements, == should work like ===.

* Etc.

But I always realize I'd just end up with Ruby or Python, both of which already exist and have fantastic ecosystems. Oh well.

Whenever I hear "the new PHP" or "its not the old mess anymore", I say to myself, thats hardly the point. The key flaw I find with PHP is with its community and lack of any mature frameworks. Half of the PHP coders are hopeless script kiddies, thanks to low barrier entry it has, and I don't feel a single framework exists that can match Rails or Django. For the matter of fact, the framework with largest community, Codeigniter, only has inline test functions for any kind of testing and doesn't even come with a auth library.

Being a PHP developer myself, I can't refute that only selling point of PHP, albeit, a major one, is its so "easy" to get things done. I feel in the near future, with advent of tools to make mature frameworks more accessible, PHP would cease to be a tool for any serious web development.

To me the criticisms about PHP are pedantic and is a result of misunderstanding the philosophy behind PHP. The kneejerk reaction language modifications the PHP community made because of the 'PHP sucks lol' meme is detrimental to the language itself.

PHP is a mature webdevelopment language that features an easy to learn, read, and develop feature set. Scala or Perl are not. (See Perl 6) So I don't see how emulating it will provide any form of benefit. Picking up a language feature because a guru attacks PHP because they can write a feature X in Y lines is almost an immature.

The reusability and performance issues were genuine, but these were to be expected given version iterations and the fact PHP introduced namespaces a while back.

This may be of interest to some: I did research and found out that 58 out of 67 web hosts in Finland either offer PHP 5.4 or 5.5 right now or at least starting from summer 2014 (5.3 EOL is in July). An increasing number of web hosts give their customers the ability to switch PHP versions (with .htaccess or some web interface). It seems this trend will speed up the installation of fresh PHP versions.

PHP's "closures" are basically you the programmer calculating the free variables in an enclosed function and then telling PHP you want them to be bound in an environment. I would laugh if it weren't so pathetic.

I don't get it. Why people can't just admit the fact that PHP had his time and now, no one with common sense would not start new project (except simple wordpress stuff) in PHP.

I don't see any mention of the "new" zend opcache which has great performance.

I used to write PHP before I got into Ruby. I'm glad PHP is getting it's shit together, but it's still a no-language for me.

"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses." -- Bjarne Stroustrup

I often wonder why a PHP killer hasn't yet been created.

I don't mean a Ruby or another vastly different language.

I mean a language similar in approach to PHP, but with the gotcha's removed, some order and consistency introduced into the API, and a few changes to the defaults. Open source, free, and on all major OS's.

What I don't comprehend is how someone can know of all this and then still stay "you know what? fuck namespaces and PSR, we are doing it old school!" and come up with arguments like "I/O overhead is costly in one class per file scenarios"[0].

These people will be the death of all of us.

[0] https://www.sellvana.com/blog/on-composer-psr-and-namespaces

The article compares PHP now to PHP in the past. But programmers should not do this, they should compare PHP to other languages and their ecosystems, and conclude that it is not fit for a greenfield project.

The new libs'n'tools are nice; good to see them showcased. But the bottom line for any developer should be to avoid it --like Perl-- for any from-scratch code. This is a legacy language now.

Here's what would make me accept PHP as passable practical web programming language: A good REPL, with good support for it over all frameworks. That's all it would take.

Given that it doesn't have one, python beats it easily.

> The memory usage in PHP 5.5 is far less than earlier versions.

Regarding Zend Engine, does anyone have a link for just how much 'less'?

Let the hate begin

TL;DR: "sucks less?"

Love the way they avoid mentioning Rails.

same article could have been written like 1 year also .

Same as the old PHP.

The title is misleading; I expected an article about Javascript.

Never go full retard.

PHP is and will always be the choice of script kiddies and freelances looking for a quick small buck.

Because it suits and is made by that niche, copy-pasted "solutions" and monkey-ing others, just as the latest versions of PHP try to monkey other language and framework thinking, shows a profound character of its community, monkey-patches thrown together to look like some thought was put into it.

It is not the language of the future, its not where inventions happen.

Its still the same old to its core, pieces cobbled together to look like something it isnt, trying to hide the inconsistencies in its core.

Nothing in that article fixes the issues that make PHP unpalatable to me. They are all new features added to the current broken set. Even if they are new and shiny they don't make the rest of the language suddenly better.

Which is really kind of the problem with PHP. All of that broken stuff was allowed to be broken for so long that it's effectively impossible to fix it. All you can do is layer on more features.