Hi! > same thing as "PHP is not $other_language, therefore nothing from that > language is useful for PHP." Which is an utterly wrong and useless
No, it's not. Nobody claims *nothing* from other languages is useful in PHP. What is claimed instead that *not everything* from other languages is useful in PHP, and, for example, importing random high-order type constructs from these languages without having extensive supporting infrastructure that those languages have makes no sense. Or, for example, importing arguments like "nulls are evil, let's replace nulls with monadic types" into PHP make much less sense in PHP context then they make in the context where they are made. > Referencing other languages to support the inclusion of a feature is not > a coolness argument. It's a "solved problem, prior art exists" The problem is that this prior art exists in different context, targeting different audience and having different styles, traditions, capabilities and support system, and it is taken wholesale without accounting for that. > argument. If a need is identified within PHP for a given feature, it is Maybe my feeling is wrong, but I do have a feeling that recently "need is identified" turned into "I can, if I think really hard, think of a complex artificial example where this feature would provide a marginal improvement". I would like a much higher barrier for "need is identified" that that. For me, some of the proposals look like solution is search of a problem. Maybe it's just because I do not understand the actual need enough. In that case I'd like to see it shown more prominently. I mean, for adding a function or a parameter to function - fine, almost any use case will do, the more the merrier. But for overhauling whole language's type system - I don't think so. > Similarly, actual computer science (as opposed to the software > engineering most of us do) is developing real and meaningful new > solutions to problem spaces, which take years, often decades, to > percolate down into production languages. That doesn't mean proposing a > language feature informed by academia is just being hipster or elitist, > it means learning from and benefiting from the work of others. That's > the whole point of OSS. I do not object to being informed by academia, far from it. I object to arguments "some folks from academia say X is a good thing, therefore we must do X". Maybe X is a good thing for PHP, maybe it isn't - but whichever way it is, it's not because somebody likes (or dislikes) it in a completely unrelated context. > its inclusion. I completely agree with that. But rejecting a feature > suggestion with "you're just trying to look cool" is unhelpful, > unconstructive, and frankly harmful to the community and the language. Nobody does that - that is not the *reason* for rejecting anything, it's just a marginal side note. I just try to turn our attention to the fact that not all cool features that exist in other languages can, or should be, in PHP, even if they do look cool. And I try to share my worry that some of the things being proposed include seriously complicating PHP's conceptual model while serving at best infrequent use cases. Simplicity is a virtue, and we have already lost significant amount of that virtue. Maybe we gained more - I don't know yet, as most of our user base isn't even on 5.5 by now. But it does worry me that we are not only losing it - we seem to be actively trying to get rid of it. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
