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PHP namespacing in many ways ruined the language. I'm not just talking about the poorly chosen use of the backslash '\' path separator or the fact that namespaces aren't automatically inferred which causes me to have to write "use" endless times at the top of the file which destroys my productivity when working outside an IDE.

I'm talking about the heart of PHP which is stream processing. Why in the world would you destroy the notion of simply including other source files in order to wedge in this C++ centric notion of a namespace? Before "namespace" and "use", the idea was that all of the files included together can be treated as one large file, and sadly that conceptual simplicity has been lost.

Also the lost opportunity of having objects be associative arrays like Javascript, combined with namespacing, have convinced me that perhaps PHP should be forked to a language more in-line with its roots. I haven't tried Hack or PHP7 yet but I am apprehensive that they probably make things worse in their own ways.

I think of PHP as a not-just-write-only version of Perl, lacking the learning curve of Ruby, with far surpassed forgiveness and access to system APIs over Javascript/NodeJS. Which is why it's still my favorite language, even though the curators have been asleep at the wheel at the most basic levels.




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