On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 03:55:26PM +0200, christian.k...@mohiva.com wrote:
> I'm a userland developer, reading the list since two years I think. And
> I must say I'm totally frustrated about the developing process itself.
>
> The actual proposal process is always the same:
>
> 1. Someone proposes a new feature.
> 2. As next there is a long discussion about the topic which ends up
> with more dissent than consensus.
I think that part of the problem is that we come to the language from different
perspectives and so have different needs and use PHP in different ways.
PHP is a language that is used by a very wide variety of people, most of who
would never think of going anywhere near a mail list like this one.
This might mean that we have to accept that people will use PHP in ways that
many of us might seem wrong. There is little point in telling them that they
should be doing things differently because as far as they are concerned they
are doing just fine.
An example of this is the procedural/objects paradigm choice.
OO is probably better for large projects and is favoured by many on this list.
Many PHP users find objects and can probably use them, but almost certainly
won't be able to write objects - the programs that they are writing are fine
as procedural.
So: rather than saying ''OO is the only way'', we need to make life easier
for those who will never write OO code.
Balanced against that is that you can't put everything into PHP.
A couple features that I have have suggested and would like:
1) The ability to insist that variables are declared before use,
aka perl's ''use strict''. To avoid breakages this would have to be
on a module by module basis, the way of detecting this is to switch
this on for the rest of a module if a declaration (outside of an object
or function) is seen, eg:
var $something;
Why ? It will reduce problems of misspelled variable names.
'var' is already a keyword so no problem there.
2) Namespaces to include variables - not just functions, objects & constants.
The argument against this is to use objects, but see my comments above,
objects are not for everyone.
This would break every variable appearing in $GLOBAL - but for new code
does this really matter ?
> 3. A long time nothing about the topic.
> 4. Start new from first point.
>
> And I think in the near feature there will be no changes with the old
> structures.
--
Alain Williams
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