Hello all, A number of factors have come together to prompt me to possibly commit mailing-list-suicide by re-opening the namespace issue.
Last week at Zendcon, a number of PHP developers/community members chatted about namespaces in PHP 6. That chat was the prime motivator for this email, but the recent (be they misguided) complaints about symbol collisions in DateTime, as well as blog entries such as Jeff Moore's on maintainability [1]. None of us chatting seemed to be able to come up with a good reason we don't yet have namespaces, other than frustration (the last time we discussed this, the thread became VERY long and drawn out), indecision (we couldn't seem to come to a decision on a suitable operator), and complacency. The way I see it is that implementing namespaces is a technical hurdle, and the reasons we haven't jumped it are political, not technical. So, let's deal with these 3 problems: Frustration: this thread will likely get long. Please avoid long-winded explanation of why you don't like the looks of "\" or how ":::" is hard to type. If you have something relevant to say, it's probably already been said [2][3]. Please review the archives. Indecision: We couldn't decide on "\" or ":::". What this comes down to is that "\" is the only remaining operator that can be typed in a single keystroke on us_en keyboards. The other choice was ":::". I, for one, am OK with either operator. I think someone with appropriate (social) karma needs to simply commit to one or the other, and we'll make do... we always do. Complacency: Most of the time, I'm happy to maintain the status quo in PHP-land. However, the lack of namespaces is causing more trouble than its absence is preventing. I think most PHP users would agree that namespaces are a welcome addition, and without them, PHP suffers. Let's take this in small steps and implement optional userspace namespacing. There's no need to dive head-first into this and make dramatic moves like putting all core functions into a PHP namespace. Baby steps, please. And, in conclusion (thanks for reading this far; I've certainly exceeded the average non-code-paste post length, a few times over), remember that the core devs discussed this in Paris, last year [4]. They didn't come to a conclusion (note the use of "if"), though. Let's settle this political issue, please, so we can get on to solving the technical issues that will inevitably crop up. S [1] http://www.procata.com/blog/archives/2006/11/09/why-is-php-code-considered-hard-to-maintain/ [2] http://beeblex.com/lists/index.php/php.internals/20586 [3] http://beeblex.com/lists/index.php/php.internals/17484 [4] http://php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html#name-spaces -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
