PHP 6 and What to Expect

An anonymous reader writes "Jero has a few interesting thoughts on what PHP 6 is driving towards and provides a nice overview of what has been keeping the PHP team busy lately. For more specifics, PHP.net also has the developers meeting minutes from last November available with a great recap of all the major issues on their platter."

Comments

Do most users even need PHP 6?

[CRCulver]

I wonder if most of the new features in PHP 6 will even appeal to most users. I started on PHP 4 with O'Reilly's Programming PHP and when PHP 5 came along, I didn't notice anything that was really missing. It's like Perl 6, there are already plenty of people who feel that what they have so far serves their needs, and there's not anything to improve upon.

Re:Namespace

[iangoldby]

From the article:

The improved OO model was probably the biggest improvement to PHP in version 5.0. PHP 6 tries to improve this even further by adding namespaces.

Will this do?

Lack of backwards compatibility

[kestasjk]

phpBB, vBulletin, mysqladmin, postnuke, phpDiplomacy (shameless self promotion), etc, etc; none will work until they've been ported to the new PHP5 OO model, and once they've been ported they won't work on PHP4.

They should leave in backwards compatibility for the class based OO model which <PHP5 uses. Once they bring out PHP6, PHP5 will be the only version which runs new and legacy PHP scripts, so PHP5 will clearly become the standard for a long time.

I'm a big fan of PHP, but with so many apps (e.g. my university's timetabling app) still in PHP3, all the rest in PHP4, both becoming obsolete, changes to the API, even changes to what's allowed within the same version; I'm starting to wonder if I should have focused on a more stable language like python or perl instead.

PHP needs serious redesigns

[tehshen]

No, seriously. PHP has accumulated a lot of broken things over the years, and it is hurting it. This new version of PHP should be turned into a whole new language entirely, or made incompatible with older versions (like Perl 6 is doing). Reasons:

PHP's design is fucked up. Some functions have underscores, others don't; some have numbers, others don't: strtolower, isset, stripslashes compared with hex2bin, is_null and strip_tags to name a few. Why? Who knows? But too many applications rely on these inconsistencies, and making them consistent would break everything.

It has no namespaces. Luckily, they are to be added in PHP 6 (and about time too!), so we can do $db::connect() rather than mysql_connect($db). So can we get rid of all the mysql_* and other pseudo-namespace functions please? They are annoying and will be wholly unnecessary.

Security problems. Register_globals and magic_quotes are still built into PHP when they should be built out and as far away from it as possible (and they are!). There are going to be people who will wonder why this upgrade breaks those things, and people should know that a new language does things differently. (Likewise: Perl 6's given/when block isn't called switch/case because it behaves differently).

Now that I've typed all that, much of my reasoning is that people rely on PHP's being bad. People should never rely on poor language design, or bugs, or bloat, of which PHP has loads. The language should work, you shouldn't need to work around the language - and if you do, you're going to have a lot of trouble rewriting your code.

There might be little incentive to switch away from older versions of PHP for some people, but a few refinements of the language won't change that. "Better than PHP" would actually be true. "Made from the PHP team" would be a major selling point too.

I know that it's a bit risky saying this here (there seem to be a lot of people who like PHP for some reason), but a serious redesign is in order, and it's more than just a simple bumping up of the version number can fix.