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?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that bothers me most is the inconsistency in function names or argument order. When I'm using PHP, I have to constantly keep looking the functions up to make sure its doing what I expect.

Re:PHP 6.0 without the stupid?

[squiggleslash]

what_have youGot AGAINST $_THEWAY PHP works($dummy, WORKS_TODAY)? I think it's==great, wait, sorry I mean "I think it's===great." - I accidentally passed in null and that last condition gave me a bunch of false positives.

I'm hoping PHP6 will finally give programmers the ==== and ===== operators we've been waiting for.

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:Bugs & Maintainers

[Grashnak]

Fork it?

Shame on you for harming future generations of girl coders! I must tweet your picture and publicly shame you!!!!

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!

Guilty pleasures

[EmperorOfCanada]

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).

Re:Guilty pleasures

[Samantha Wright]

There are a lot of very real technical reasons why people don't like PHP. The syntax and naming of its function library is inconsistent, the type coercion is irregular, and it's inconsistent about warnings vs. errors—it tends to keep executing code even when it shouldn't, potentially leading to unwanted behaviour during development if a variable isn't set or something. Reddit has a fairly active board devoted to the various problems that can occur, not all of them avoidable.

One of the most peculiar details in all of this is that PHP's original author (and, I think, but don't quote me on this, a portion of the development staff) considers himself a non-programmer; that PHP was just thrown together to simplify work. That would be okay, but it's led to a lot of security holes, bugs, and irreversible bad choices over the years, like having to use === in string parsing because false is returned by strpos() if it doesn't find anything (and false == 0). No other language requires this particular quirk.

I don't blame you for not liking Ruby. While it's a much cleaner language, it's got some very peculiar syntactical features that make a lot of people scratch their heads—most notably, there are circumstances under which return doesn't work normally, which can be very frustrating. However, there are some very creative uses of familiar syntax that, for example, make strings really easy to work with; haystack['needle'] = 'thread' is the same as $haystack = str_replace('needle', 'thread', $haystack) in PHP. I haven't used it personally, but I think the major reason Ruby projects get abandoned so much is because the people writing code in it are not experienced programmers.

Running down the list a little and hopping over JVM stuff, the other decent web languages you may want to consider are Perl and Python. Both have extremely well-developed libraries and are good with strings, so it's mostly just a question of picking "esoteric and terse" vs. "newbie-friendly and easily maintained." Decent JVM languages include JWT, Scala, and Clojure (with noir; check out that sexy beast), although JWT is probably overkill for anything smaller than Gmail.