PHP5's Successor Might Be PHP7

[Delgarde]

Anyway, I read that PHP is a wacky and funny language with childish/rushed decisions because its author had issues, is it still true and will it be true for PHP 7?

That seems an odd thing to say. PHP is almost twenty years old, and most of it's flaws aren't due to quirks of the author - they're because they seemed like good ideas back at the time when building web pages with something like PHP was a real novelty.. True, it doesn't compare so well after so all those years - the design is showing it's age - but don't forget that when comparing it with modern frameworks.

PHP is *old* by the standards of web trends... for comparison, there was no such thing as CSS when the first version of PHP was released, and Javascript was a little-used novelty. Netscape 3 was considered a state-of-the-art browser, and Internet Explorer, that bane of web developers, had yet to be released.

[the303]

The list of PHP flaws is quite long. But from my POV most of these flaws are not meaningful.

For me the biggest PHP issue is speed. I like modern PHP frameworks.

On the other hand you have really good and fast language - C++ that lacks of really good web framework. There is nothing like C++ Symfony or Zend with good ORM.

So you have crappy language or crappy frameworks

There is one called Wt. I have heard it is quite like Qt and handles a lot of things and using modern web technologies. It also abstracts a lot of HTML designing as my friend says. I haven't dived into it personally though.

[Guest]

It also abstracts a lot of HTML designing as my friend says.

I hope it's not this kind of nightmare like qcodo. V in MVC doesn't mean that you must have helpers for creating tables.

[TheOne]

It seems that people here talking bullcrap about the language havent played with it since version 4. Please inform your selfs before... the language now even supports namespaces, closures, generators, etc... pretty up to date for me. Theres even a framework for async stuff like nodejs named reactphp. Also hhvm has evolved the language with scalar type hinting and class templates. At leasr scalar type hinting is going to make it into php 5.7. In any case I agree with othe poster that next release should just be 5.7 and 7.0 when they add jit to phpng which is the 5.7 branch

[Remdul]

Whatever version comes next, I hope it is going to break compatibility in major ways. For the sake of security.

As of PHP5, it is nearly impossible to write safe code. Even the smallest language constructs are compromized (right down to operators). Every once in a while I discover some new 'feature' in PHP (usually reading a sidenote on StackOverflow, or an obscure forum comment) that makes me go 'OH SHIT!' because I know I've got a security bug in dozens of previously written webapps. And I consider myself to be a very security-conscious coder.

I generally assume that 50% to 80% of all PHP applications are compromised. 5% may be well tested and secure, and whatever remains is secure by plain luck (or simplicity) alone.

I've gone as far as refuse to claim, to clients, that my products are safe. I wish the creators of PHP would share my honesty.

[Tom B]

I generally assume that 50% to 80% of all PHP applications are compromised. 5% may be well tested and secure, and whatever remains is secure by plain luck (or simplicity) alone.

[citation needed]


PHP Does have some terrible flaws and I hope they get fixed, but your opinion is based little on facts. There is some stupid stuff in PHP. e.g. my favourite:

'0' and 0 are equivalent
'0' and 'foo' are not equivalent
so logically 0 and 'foo' are not equivalent... except in PHP they bizarrely are. 0 == 'foo'. *scratches head*

Stuff like this is terrible and needs fixing, but it's not nearly as much of an issue as you're making it out to be.

[curaga]

It seems that people here talking bullcrap about the language havent played with it since version 4. Please inform your selfs before... the language now even supports namespaces, closures, generators, etc... pretty up to date for me. Theres even a framework for async stuff like nodejs named reactphp. Also hhvm has evolved the language with scalar type hinting and class templates. At leasr scalar type hinting is going to make it into php 5.7. In any case I agree with othe poster that next release should just be 5.7 and 7.0 when they add jit to phpng which is the 5.7 branch

Have they unified their function naming and argument order yet? No?

[Luke_Wolf]

It seems that people here talking bullcrap about the language havent played with it since version 4. Please inform your selfs before... the language now even supports namespaces, closures, generators, etc... pretty up to date for me. Theres even a framework for async stuff like nodejs named reactphp. Also hhvm has evolved the language with scalar type hinting and class templates. At leasr scalar type hinting is going to make it into php 5.7. In any case I agree with othe poster that next release should just be 5.7 and 7.0 when they add jit to phpng which is the 5.7 branch

The problem isn't about being up to date or not, the problem is about being poorly bolted on hack on top of poorly bolted hack on top of poorly bolted on hack, with deep fundamental flaws like the broken equality operator.

[psychoticmeow]

Have they unified their function naming and argument order yet? No?

Have they released a final product? No.

But I'm going to pretend you weren't being a dismissive shit and actually answer the question: maybe, to a degree. You see PHP already has taken steps towards unified naming in the form of OOP versions of most functions, for an example of this see the Date/Time manual.

The bit that's missing and much harder to achieve is doing the same thing for primitive types, because you're just going to end up creating a bigger mess of function names than when you started, unless you add methods to primitive types, which is being discussed and various solutions already exist to enable it.

If you're interested in a rough overview of what has changed since PHP 4, then I've already written an article just for you.

[psychoticmeow]

The problem isn't about being up to date or not, the problem is about being poorly bolted on hack on top of poorly bolted hack on top of poorly bolted on hack, with deep fundamental flaws like the broken equality operator.

If you know you don't want the "broken" behaviour just use the === operator? Seems to work for everyone else.