

What is new in PHP 5.3 for PHP amateurs? - acangiano
http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/what-is-new-in-php-53-for-php-amateurs/

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ashleyw
Does anyone who knows and uses Ruby or Python and PHP have any thoughts on
whether its worth me revisiting PHP? (I currently use Ruby exclusively, after
I left PHP when I was pretty much a total amateur.)

It does look cool with all these new features, I'm just not sure if it'd be a
slight waste of my time, since I already know a language which works well for
the web…?

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jonhohle
Up until a few months ago I was entrenched in PHP. Now I don't do any PHP, and
nothing in 5.3 makes it enticing to go back. They've fixed some things (late
static binding), added some things (lambda's, namespaces), but these are
already things that Ruby has and was designed for.

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fortes
The phar (php archive) feature is nice. PHP is already quite easy to deploy,
this makes it even easier.

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Nycto
The article incorrectly states that Traits (think mix-ins, for you ruby guys)
have been added to 5.3. This isn't true. While a patch has been implemented,
it isn't slated to be released in 5.3. Some later version, no doubt.

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Herring
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I’ll use PHP." Now
they have two problems.

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sunkencity
aargh! not ANOTHER way to connect to mysql database again!

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TweedHeads
Sometimes I think time has come for somebody to fork php, fix all the little
quirks and relaunch it as a new language, simpler and more adapted to the web
world of today.

Blog\save() is one of them

Using the dot as concatenator is another one.

And there are hundreds that haven´t been touched because of fear of backward
compatibility uprising.

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wvenable
I can live with a lot of the crap. I understand the history and practicality
of it. But the backslash for namespaces. That's just too much. There's no
history for it. There's no good reason for it. It's just stupid and ugly. If
someone forked PHP tomorrow and changed just that one thing for now I'd
probably use the fork. The decision shows that PHP will not get better.

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asnyder
The above sounds like a religious statement. What difference does it make that
it's a \ over a .? It does what it needs to do.

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wvenable
Because the language already has :: copied from C++. But rather than
continuing to use :: for both namespaces and static class access, exactly like
it's done in C++, they added _yet another_ operator. To solve a problem that
doesn't exist.

So rather than simplifying the language, they're making it more complicated
(especially by choosing the escape character). It's just dumb.

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jrockway
Well, to be fair to the implementors, using \ makes the parser slightly easier
to implement. Good languages (and libraries) are willing to make
implementation harder if it makes the code easier for the user to write. But
this is PHP.

You seem surprised.

