2 PHP Versions: Classic and Pro
Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 8:00 pm
I've been toying with the idea of making a separate version of PHP. PHP is great, everybody on this forum should know that but for those who use it day in day out there are frustrating aspects to it that could be improved on in an isolated environment.
PHP 5 was a bold step that I have come to appreciate but it has inadvertently created two strains of PHP developer. Those who have the ability to configure their own server and install PHP 5 and those that don't and are stuck with PHP 4. So it would seem that this separate version idea already exists in some disorganised unintentional sense; why not capitalize on it and benefit both parties?
Let's consider for a moment what causes so many good language feature suggestions to be declined. Well for starters the developers of PHP are massively focused on PHP's ease of use. It is this belief that led to the creation of 'register globals' *insert groan* and the rejection of features which impose some much needed structure to PHP. Secondly PHP's maturity is heavily restricted by backwards compatibility concerns.
Suppose PHP was to be separated out into two versions what would those versions be? I envisage PHP Classic and PHP Pro. PHP Classic would be the PHP 4 you know and love while PHP Pro would be like PHP Classic with:
Separating PHP out into two versions would also have psycological implications. For example there would be forums for PHP Classic and forums for PHP Pro and a good deal of the users of these forums would stay on one of the other and created separate environments.
Anyway that's my piece. I'm not saying this is a good idea but I'm interested in peoples opinions on this and also people would like to see put into PHP to aid more serious developers.
Now spout!
PHP 5 was a bold step that I have come to appreciate but it has inadvertently created two strains of PHP developer. Those who have the ability to configure their own server and install PHP 5 and those that don't and are stuck with PHP 4. So it would seem that this separate version idea already exists in some disorganised unintentional sense; why not capitalize on it and benefit both parties?
Let's consider for a moment what causes so many good language feature suggestions to be declined. Well for starters the developers of PHP are massively focused on PHP's ease of use. It is this belief that led to the creation of 'register globals' *insert groan* and the rejection of features which impose some much needed structure to PHP. Secondly PHP's maturity is heavily restricted by backwards compatibility concerns.
Suppose PHP was to be separated out into two versions what would those versions be? I envisage PHP Classic and PHP Pro. PHP Classic would be the PHP 4 you know and love while PHP Pro would be like PHP Classic with:
- Case sensitive functions
- Properly standardized functionNames(), arguments and return types
- Cleaner global namespace
- Fewer PHP.ini configurations in favour of new special runtime configuration syntax
- Built-in Optimizer
- Out dated function sets replaced with more comprehensive classes
- Bundled with Zend Framework
- Manatory OO based development (maybe objective input and output streams for example)
- Block level variable scope
- Drop double-quote string syntax?
- Drop variable dollar symbol syntax?
Separating PHP out into two versions would also have psycological implications. For example there would be forums for PHP Classic and forums for PHP Pro and a good deal of the users of these forums would stay on one of the other and created separate environments.
Anyway that's my piece. I'm not saying this is a good idea but I'm interested in peoples opinions on this and also people would like to see put into PHP to aid more serious developers.
Now spout!