Hi,
> * Alternative functions exist which are more descriptive, easily
> understood, and more readily searchable (for example, many common Google
> searches omit the “`” token entirely when searching).
>
> It is very easy to understand `` since it has analogues in other script
languages, also searching for "php backtick" easily leads to PHP manual.
>
This is true, if you know they are called a backtick. It's not a frequent
used character in a lot of languages and to be honest, I don't even know
what the name is in my own language. I only know the English name because I
encountered it in PHP, and besides of markdown I never use this character.
I agree with the point made in the RFC, if you're a new developer and you
have no idea what this character is called, it's hard to find out what it
is and what it does.
> > Backticks are visually easily confused with single quotes despite
> exhibiting radically different behaviour.
>
> In my font they are not even close. This sounds like calling to stop
> using letter O because it looks like 0. Maybe if it's a problem - use
> one of the many available programmer's fonts which solve such problems
> easily.
>
Even then at times they can be hard to distinguish. My eyesight isn't the
best anymore and without my glasses, I can't see the difference in the
majority of fonts until I put them next to each other, so I can understand
why it can be confusing.
I think one of the most important things missing from the RFC, is that it
reduces the complexity by removing a second way of doing something. I've
had to write Ruby a couple of times (vagrant, capistrano), and the thing I
struggled the most with, was that different guides used different notations
that all ended up doing the same, which I did not know. This is something
that makes me question why something can be done in two different ways,
might result in extra searches and generally speaking causes more overhead
for (new) developers; "Why is this example using `ls` and the other
exec('ls')? What is the difference? Which one should I use? Are there
benefits in using one over the other?" vs. "This is how it's done".
I'm personally in favor of this RFC. It's easy to replace backticks by exec
and it improves the developer experience, especially for new developers.
For me this outweighs the BC break it will cause in the future, especially
given it will be deprecated in 8.0 and thus gives developers an eternity to
fix it.
Regards,
Lynn van der Berg
