PHP 5.5.0 Released

New submitter irventu writes "The long-awaited PHP 5.5.0 has finally been released, bringing many new features and integrating Zend's recently open-sourced OPcache. With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands, Google recently announcing support for PHP in its App Engine and the current PHP renaissance is well underway. This is great news for the web's most popular scripting language." The full list of new features is available at the Change Log, and the source code is at the download page.

Comments

PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for a PHP 6.0 that's an actual rewrite without all the stupid. With every new version, I just see more features get tacked on ("Objects").

It's wonderfully backward compatible because nothing really gets removed in newer versoins, but it would be nice if the language could be made more pleasant to use.

Re:PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[gmack]

Because then some people would have to stop updating? The place I work has code dating back 10 or 11 years and the programmers already have to go through the code each update to see what got dropped and even then there will be demands for the upgrade to be rolled back or "delayed" (moved to a point in the future that never happens because they never have time for it).

It's not just in house stuff that doesn't update either, Check out large Open source projects and see how many of them generate warnings related to deprecated functions.

If you want a language that has no cruft there are languages you can switch to but not many people use them for the reasons stated a above.

Re:PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[kbolino]

Indeed, but the problem is type coercion and not dynamic typing. You can have a dynamically typed language that does not coerce unlike types to make life "easier".

Re: PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[thetoadwarrior]

This is one of the biggest problems. It's a horrible language to look at. The carelessness carries through the community too. You simply can't trust third party to be anything but amateur. But who can blame PHP devs when the core language is cack and the documentation is laughable.

Re: PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[Bert64]

Part of the problem with PHP is that it's designed to be simple to pick up... Many people start by just adding one or two simple PHP tags to an existing HTML file and go from there.

No need to learn a development environment, no need to create archives or packages, quite literally anyone can create their first "dynamic" webpage by adding one line of php to an existing html file, many people do something really simple like just show the current time etc.

This accessibility has a price, because php is accessible to people with little or no experience of writing code, then lots of such people use it and this often results in very poor code. It's perfectly possible to write very clean code with PHP, you just have to look for it amongst all the thousands of novice programmers turning out junk.

Re: PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[Dracos]

Hey, don't blame all of us for Wordpress.

Re:PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[squiggleslash]

While that's true, the complaint isn't that PHP has a dynamic typing system and has some operators that reflect that, it's that the coercion and comparison rules are... not exactly easy to predict. Not to mention the fact === works the way you'd expect == to work, with == performing non-intuitive coercion to try to find a way to make different things the same.

assert(""==false);
assert(0==false);
assert("0"==false);
assert(null==false);

All of these will succeed.

* Intuitively to a non-PHP programmer, only the second one should.
* A PHP programmer with experience will, on the other hand, note that given "echo 1==2" products no output, only the first should be guaranteed to succeed with the second one maybe kinda succeeding.

The others? Dubious at best. The third should always fail, because "0" != "false" and "0" != "" (but PHP is doing the wrong coercion so it instead converts the string to a boolean rather than vice-versa), the fourth treats null in a way that almost makes SQL look logical.

Ironically, your observation makes my joke more accurate than originally intended. Given the behavior of == is not what's needed in a dynamically typed, softly typed, language, and === provides only one of the legitimate comparison operators necessary for such a language, we do, actually, need an ==== operator in PHP. Scary, huh?

Citation needed

[benjymouse]

With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands

Citation needed. Why does the summary contain this blurb which is not even relevant to the story. Me suspects that the submitter could be an advocate who just ceased on an opportunity to tell slashdot about his favorite PHP framework.

Really?

[LizardKing]

With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands

Citation please.

Yeah, I'm sure

[Trailer Trash]

With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands...

CodeIgnitor? Maybe. RoR? Um, no. Or, perhaps, in your dreams.

As an RoR developer who left PHP years ago I assure you - we aren't just waiting for a really good PHP framework that's an RoR knockoff. Part of the greatness of Rails is Ruby, and looking through the Laravel docs just confirms that. It looks like Laravel is about as nice as you can get on PHP, but ultimately it's still PHP underneath (and on top).

Rails is a meta-language built on top of Ruby. Just can't do that in PHP.

And that's not even getting into the ugliness of PHP's cruft that's been built up over the years.

A public thank you to the PHP team

[Boss, Pointy Haired]

Yes it has its flaws, yes you sometimes don't know whether you're looking for needles in haystacks or haystacks in needles, but it's not like they're not aware of that, and it's not really a big deal either in these days of syntax and function aware editors and instant online reference, and it has provided me and i'm sure many thousands of other people with a career not just in contract coding but also in being used almost exclusively on our own websites.

Thanks guys!