Tony Marston wrote on 09/03/2016 09:51:
Those who advocate the removal of long-standing features of the language FOR NO GOOD REASON [...]
What you have to understand is that this is YOUR OPINION. Even if, in your opinion, anyone who doesn't share that opinion is incompetent, or whatever word you choose, it doesn't really help anyone to keep saying so.
One other point, you are talking about those managing the language as "they", but it should be "we" - by actively participating in this list, YOU are part of the group steering the language, just as much as any of the people talking on this thread.
You first have to define what is "consistent" and what is not, and that will be a difficult exercise as different people will have different opinions, just as there is agreed definition of "perfect" and "pure" and "best".
This is true, but I don't think "perfect" needs to be the aim; we can come up with ideas that have a rough consensus [1] about what we'd like the language to look like, and what it's practical to change. For instance, do we want the language to be more Perl like (lots of overlapping features, TMTOWTDI) or more "opinionated" (with an explicit "right" way to do things)?
I think that the PHP language developers should have a policy that no feature or function can be removed from the language UNLESS it is proven to cause either security or performance issues. They can add new features for whatever reason without forcing me to use them, but they should leave all existing features alone.
That seems like a reasonable start, but there are problems with such a blanket prohibition: some new features require old code to be broken in order to be implemented, and any change can break something that someone was relying on [https://xkcd.com/1172/] so you need some definition of "existing feature".
Anyone who does not like the way that PHP works should be told to switch to a language that they DO like.
Just a quick point that here, too, you can include yourself - if you think PHP is such a badly-run language, you are free to use a different one. Clearly, though, there are some things you like about it, which is why you're here, one of us, trying to make it better.
[1] Somebody linked a while ago to this RFC, which I admit I haven't fully read, about "rough consensus". https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7282
Regards, -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP] -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
