I used to use PHP all the time. It really was revelatory when it came out.
This article is a little short on explanations or examples, though, so it’s hard to even really know what a lot of this is about, but it sounds mostly like syntax refinements and a few new language features. Which is great. Between that and the performance improvements, I’m glad to hear that PHP is still alive and well.
All that said, my memory of why PHP got such a bad rep was not so much the language itself, but the truly dangerous defaults, magically populated variables and more, that were so embedded into the usage of the language that for years, the maintainers were reluctant to make the necessary breaking changes to address the risks. Those issues drove far more people away—to the emerging frameworks like Rails and Django or all the way to Java or .NET—than the lack of named parameters or the need for the ‘array’ keyword.
This article is a little short on explanations or examples, though, so it’s hard to even really know what a lot of this is about, but it sounds mostly like syntax refinements and a few new language features. Which is great. Between that and the performance improvements, I’m glad to hear that PHP is still alive and well.
All that said, my memory of why PHP got such a bad rep was not so much the language itself, but the truly dangerous defaults, magically populated variables and more, that were so embedded into the usage of the language that for years, the maintainers were reluctant to make the necessary breaking changes to address the risks. Those issues drove far more people away—to the emerging frameworks like Rails and Django or all the way to Java or .NET—than the lack of named parameters or the need for the ‘array’ keyword.