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PHP Finally Getting a Formal Specification

Posted by timothy on from the let-the-ossification-ceremony-commence dept.

itwbennett (1594911) writes "Despite becoming one of the most widely used programming languages on the Web, PHP didn't have a formal specification — until now. Facebook engineer and PHP core contributor Sara Golemon announced the initiative at OSCON earlier this month, and an initial draft of the specification was posted Wednesday on GitHub."

4 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Formal specifications are pretty useless for th by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Not really.
    If you don't have a formal specification and you have two implementations that do different things, there is no way to know which is correct.
    Besides, not having a specification is what led to PHP being such an ad-hoc mess in the first place.

  2. its why devs cringe. by nimbius · · Score: 3, Insightful

    As a devops (christ i hate that word.) engineer, the fact that the lack of a formal specification was overlooked for 20 years has been and is currently a big red flag for any legitimate software project. It was the knee-jerk reaction to Jakarta/Tomcat/Struts and ultimately java based, head first strict-type coding that turned programming projects into concentration camps. It emerged during a period when programmers were still struggling to determine how to present content to users sustainably, instead of having to write the entire page in perl. IMHO this is too little too late.

    This is entirely opinion, but having lived with web n.x for 15 years, Python has emerged a juggernaut to contend with in RESTful coding environments. it learned from PHP's mistakes and walked away from perl with a firm understanding of what made it uncomfortable from the debug standpoint. things like CherryPy, TurboGears, pylons and even pecan can turn a proof of concept in a day, and can easily and quickly be scaled across the infrastructure.

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    1. Re:its why devs cringe. by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Python has emerged a juggernaut to contend with in RESTful coding environments.

      Putting aside the whole whitespace debate(*), I'm pretty sure that python has its own list of issues. Maybe not to the same extent as PHP, but they exist.

      * For which I personally do have trouble with python - I want the computer to bend to my will, not the other way around.

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  3. Full specification text: by goodmanj · · Score: 2, Insightful

    PHP Formal Specification:

    1) Don't use PHP.