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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.
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.
I participated in beta release testing for 5.5 and I'm frustrated that it still has old bugs that cause segfaults that continue to go ignored by the maintainers. I even supplied the patch and submitted a Github pull request, but the maintainers continue to ignore it.
It's no fun having to keep our own custom patchsets for PHP just to keep it running properly.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
You only need a peek to see this Laravel dubbed "PHP renaissance" does not even try to be statically safe. It's littered with pitfalls like writing your validators with strings, such as: "array('name' => array('required', 'min:5')), ...".
(It is possible to write statically typed validators, with clean syntax (depending on language) and you end up not loosing stuff like auto-completion, semantic checking by IDE etc. See for instance latest Scala PlayFramework and it's JSON validation, it is relatively easy to use, and syntax is surprisingly succinct taken the fact it's extremely type-safe.)
With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands
Citation please.
Is for someone to write a new standard API that can sit in parallel to their old one that gives us sanity like string manipulation functions with real names and consistent parameters. You know stuff like:
$x = string::indexOf($source, $needle);
and
$x = string::replaceAll($source, $needle, $regularExpression);
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.
Do you have ESP?
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!
Yes, why NOT rewrite the entire language tokenizer for vague reasons of potentially avoiding a single keystroke?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I have two guilty pleasures: Watching the show COPS, and programming in PHP.
I dream about getting away from PHP and occasionally dip my toes in other waters (Python, Java, and even C++) but always come back to PHP. I won't go to Ruby for as many websites start with Ruby and then abandon it for many other languages. People blah blah about MVC but often what I am doing is just too damn simple to need such added complexity. I might need a program that I occasionally run to view a list of spam flagged submissions; it is done in 10 minutes in PHP. I don't use any frameworks and am diligent enough to keep things running through prepared statements and whatnot. With opcode caching and memory caching of data PHP is very very fast.
It is not so much that PHP is the best at anything it is that it isn't really terrible at anything I care about. Almost every other language is terrible at at least one thing that I do care about.
Personally I think that PHP gets its bad rap because it is a very easy transition from HTML. So you have basically non programmers starting to sprinkle PHP into their HTML and oddly enough an untrained programmer's first efforts end up being crap. Then because PHP covers all the web server basics these programmers potentially never venture beyond PHP and there is nothing better for making a bad programmer than a one language programmer. (Not someone who primarily programs in one language but one who only ever learned the one language) So these same programmers keep expanding the scope of their terrible code.
So if anyone can suggest a programming language to replace PHP I would love to know (and all JVM languages are off my list).
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