

Rasmus Lerdorf Talks PHP 5.6, 6.0 and Beyond - gigiread
http://blog.wepay.com/post/87335593111/rasmus-lerdorf-talks-php-5-6-6-0-and-beyond

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arenaninja
Incidentally, Rasmus was in fact the most famous programmer from Greenland I
met on that month when I met him

I hope that 6.0 does clear out some of the interchangeability between stack
and needle, but that could be a huge barrier for upgrading.

A few other things on my wish list would be python-like arrays/strings, with
slicing via [].slice(). Every time I do something of moderate complexity it
ends up looking huge.

For example, converting snAke_case to snakeCase looks like this:

    
    
      lcfirst(implode(array_map('ucfirst', explode('_', $string))))
    

Where I would like:

    
    
      $string.explode('_').map('uc_first').implode().lcfirst()

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hberg
I sat through his talk and I definitely recommend taking a look at the slides.
The new language features are exciting (like argument unpacking in function
signatures [1] and constant scalar expressions [2]). What was really useful
was learning how to deploy atomically without killing existing requests[3].

[1] -
[http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56unpack](http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56unpack)
[2] -
[http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56constscalar](http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56constscalar)
[3] - [http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/7](http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/7)

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frik
Two snippets I found significant and good news:

Q: What about backward compatibility? I’m worried that PHP might go down the
path that Python went down with Python 3 not compatible with Python 2.

    
    
      Rasmus: We’re not planning a Python type of break. 
      Chances are that anything that breaks in PHP 6 will be 
      features that resulted in pretty hard warnings in PHP 5
      [...] No drastic changes are planned in PHP 6.
    

Q: What’s your take on the static code analysis?

    
    
      Rasmus: [...] The community is hoping to get Facebook to 
      release their static analysis system as a standalone
      tool. [...]
    

Btw. the linked slides provide a good overview of new features.

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thatmiddleway
So what.

~~~
schmerdy
what so what? If you don't care about PHP, that's fine. Just don't read it,
there's plenty of news about Apple Swift right here on HN. But some of us
actually care or have to care...

