Changes In Store For PHP V6 368
An anonymous reader sends in an IBM DeveloperWorks article detailing the changes coming in PHP V6 — from namespaces, to Web 2.0 built-ins, to a few features that are being removed.
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Changes In Store For PHP V6
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Backwards compatibility is very important (Score:5, Interesting)
regardless, backwards compatibility is important for those people. for starters, these are the people who have chosen php as the platform to conduct their business on, making php a de facto dominant language for the web instead of being a small time web language that was used on web savvy, webmasters. the financial impact of this is going to be huge for them, to adopt to that many changes php dev group started to introduce in the span of 1 to 2 years. this is too much.
you gotta slow down. or you are going to alienate the small business community from using php with what you are doing. if you break a small estore owner's store script every 1.5 years for 'upgrading', the second time you do it they will jump the language ship.
do not start to become an elitist group out of touch with the people, increasingly caring for nifty programming issues rather than what would the users think.
Re:Backwards compatibility is very important (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Backwards compatibility is very important (Score:3, Interesting)
May not seem like a big deal until some idiot doesn't update his scripts and some script kiddie comes along and you get 350 calls from your clients asking you why there's some terrorist propaganda on their website.
what's with the 'phpsucks' tag? (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps we need an article on 'why php sucks' ?
Re:what's with the 'phpsucks' tag? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not the lack of modules that people complain about. PHP is excessively convenient, if nothing else. :)
New PHP features are great and all but.... (Score:5, Interesting)
For exmaple take the newish try / catch exception features. On first glance you think "finally I can write decent exception handling into my own code" - which is great for your own exceptions but too many of the core functions used by your code or by a framework you're using don't throw exceptions - they indicate an error codition in the function's result.
So now we're seeing loads of code out there by people trying to do things "The right way (tm)" but it's full of bugs as there's exception conditions being raised by core functions that don't get caught by the catch blocks.
The line from TFA that concerns me is "Much improved for PHP V6 is support for Unicode strings in many of the core functions"
Many? That will means developers will start using unicode only to find scattered lines of code throughout the app doesn't work as the core function it uses doesn't support unicode. The overhead of keeping track of which functions do and don't support unicode will be a nightmare.
Re:what's with the 'phpsucks' tag? (Score:1, Interesting)
I have programmed in assembler, Basic, C, C++, VB, VBScript, WordBasic, Java, Javascript (and Jscript), Actionscript (1, 2, and 3), Lisp, and Pascal. I disagree that any of these are more expressive than PHP.
Then please describe what you mean when you say "expressive", because you and I seem to have wildly differing definitions.
Also, to assume it's all I know is *really* irritating.
The only likely explanation I could think of for you considering PHP to be expressive is that you had not been exposed to any other language. My next hypothesis is that you didn't actually mean expressive. If that also proves to be false, I will look for another explanation, because the idea that somebody might actually consider PHP to be more expressive than other languages is extremely unlikely. I rank you blatantly lying as more likely than you genuinely considering PHP to be expressive while having knowledge of other languages.
This is not mindless PHP bashing. I have used PHP for years myself. It has its good points and its bad points. But it is simply not expressive compared with other languages. Even most die-hard PHP advocates recognise that. Hell, ask the guys at Zend, and even they will probably tell you that PHP's strengths lie elsewhere.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:4, Interesting)
I do want a certain amount of control over the structure of my code, even if a lot of it will be by convention. Having any automated tool try to "fix" someone else's code is likely to screw up things like comments which are cleverly indented and aligned with some code, or similarly interesting code.
And an IDE is overkill in many other ways, yet they still often find ways to miss some functionality I want. That, and I tend to be much more easily able to switch text editors than switch IDEs.
Disclaimer: I'm not GP, and I use Ruby.
Re:Magic Quotes Removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Using the example in the article:
<?php
$sql = "INSERT INTO USERS (USERNAME) VALUES $_GET['username']";
?>
If magic quotes is, indeed, on, the database will see a query that looks like this:
INSERT INTO USERS (USERNAME) VALUES 'testUser'
if magic quotes is turned off, sure, an injection attack is possible, as the query will become:
INSERT INTO USERS (USERNAME) VALUES testUser
And as long as a dev tests their code after upgrading to v6.0 they'd notice that the DBMS has thrown a 'testUser is not a column/udf/sproc' error.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:3, Interesting)
All this code is doing is accepting a method name, validating it as valid (yes, an Enum dt would help here), and returning it if it is.
In which case, this is much better:
if (is_callable($method)) {
return method;
}
Or, more on point, you'd never even call the __call() method, you'd just call is_callable().
I think the point is to show a plausible example of PHP being "hard work like C."
I'm not a PHP apologist. It's got a lot of problems. Chief among them a glaring inconsistency that just makes an elegence-loving guy like myself cry my eyes out. But to say that it's "hard work like C" just because it retained a syntax and offers up some thin wrappers around C functions is, I believe, disingenuous.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Loose typing and non-strict syntax in general is particularly well suited to the internet because each request generates a completely new environment. Something that was wrong with the previous request, unless specifically stored, doesn't affect the next request. Strictness in programming stems from the need to keep far flung parts from affecting each other; the web is modular by nature and thus resistant to wide spread bugs. Thus, loose typing and other, less strict forms of programming that make life easier at the expense of fragility is counterbalanced by the modular nature.
Many won't agree with that analysis, and that's fine. Sloppy coding has gotten more than one web project in trouble, and more than one feature of PHP's that was intended to make life easier ended up going to far and introducing security holes. But that doesn't change the simple fact that PHP was made for the web and has conveniences built into the core that other languages either don't have or require an add on for.
Re:Is this really news? (Score:2, Interesting)
Now they need to get rid of the fatal error on function redefinition or function not found stupidity (that was REALLY retarded, probably the single worst feature after the three I mentioned), lexical scoping, syntax for lambda-expressions, first-class functions, better garbage collection, true object-orientation, a decent class system (i.e. one that's not modelled after Java's), operator overloading, associative arrays with support for non-string keys, decent iterators which don't require you to define 235789051 methods - just one (next) as a minimum, generators, coroutines, threads, a decent eval without the return insanity, and functional programming tools. Oh, wait, they need Python!
On top of that, I'd get rid of statements (make all of them expressions), add guaranteed tail-call elimination and get rid of the dollar sign.
Re:Magic Quotes Removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Major version? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know if Matz was among those who held those incorrect beliefs, but even if he wasn't, there still won't have been any compelling reason for him to adopt Unicode. Multilingual character sets are only a big win if you're mixing multiple languages. If Matz didn't originally expect Ruby to take off in a big way internationally, then for the sorts of uses he probably envisaged, just Japanese and English would be fine, and you can handle that combination perfectly well using any of the legacy Japanese systems.