PHP 5.5.0 Released 219
New submitter irventu writes "The long-awaited PHP 5.5.0 has finally been released, bringing many new features and integrating Zend's recently open-sourced OPcache. With the new Laravel PHP framework winning RoRs and CodeIgnitor converts by the thousands, Google recently announcing support for PHP in its App Engine and the current PHP renaissance is well underway. This is great news for the web's most popular scripting language."
The full list of new features is available at the Change Log, and the source code is at the download page.
Not even trying to be statically safe (Score:4, Interesting)
You only need a peek to see this Laravel dubbed "PHP renaissance" does not even try to be statically safe. It's littered with pitfalls like writing your validators with strings, such as: "array('name' => array('required', 'min:5')), ...".
(It is possible to write statically typed validators, with clean syntax (depending on language) and you end up not loosing stuff like auto-completion, semantic checking by IDE etc. See for instance latest Scala PlayFramework and it's JSON validation, it is relatively easy to use, and syntax is surprisingly succinct taken the fact it's extremely type-safe.)
Re:Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yeah, I'd like a citation, too. I'm a RoR developer and had never heard of Laravel. Looking at the syntax in the Laravel quick-start brings back bad memories, though. PHP just isn't very good at DSLs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Guilty pleasures (Score:5, Interesting)
I dream about getting away from PHP and occasionally dip my toes in other waters (Python, Java, and even C++) but always come back to PHP. I won't go to Ruby for as many websites start with Ruby and then abandon it for many other languages. People blah blah about MVC but often what I am doing is just too damn simple to need such added complexity. I might need a program that I occasionally run to view a list of spam flagged submissions; it is done in 10 minutes in PHP. I don't use any frameworks and am diligent enough to keep things running through prepared statements and whatnot. With opcode caching and memory caching of data PHP is very very fast.
It is not so much that PHP is the best at anything it is that it isn't really terrible at anything I care about. Almost every other language is terrible at at least one thing that I do care about.
Personally I think that PHP gets its bad rap because it is a very easy transition from HTML. So you have basically non programmers starting to sprinkle PHP into their HTML and oddly enough an untrained programmer's first efforts end up being crap. Then because PHP covers all the web server basics these programmers potentially never venture beyond PHP and there is nothing better for making a bad programmer than a one language programmer. (Not someone who primarily programs in one language but one who only ever learned the one language) So these same programmers keep expanding the scope of their terrible code.
So if anyone can suggest a programming language to replace PHP I would love to know (and all JVM languages are off my list).
Re:PHP 6.0 without the stupid? (Score:2, Interesting)
And I'm still waiting for all the PHP haters to fork it and create a new version and "do it right." The language is open source, you know.
Evidently none of the self-proclaimed "experts" in programming language design is willing to fix PHP.