I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I think in many ways PHP is a lost cause. It simply has too much baggage that to get it to a point where it's good would mean changing so much it's unrecognisable.
That said, it's the language I'm currently using in my job, and I think that most of these changes are for the better.
I also think they're awkward to look at. I see the same happening in Javascriptland, with new syntaxes which either look completely alien or look too close to a different syntax and mean you need to know multiple ways of doing the same thing in order to read anyone else's code. And there are far too many hacks where PHP developers have tried to standardise things their own way and turned the whole thing into an XKCD-style warning to their fellow humans.
Looking forward to most of those changes, but some things like constructor promotion are definitely going to take extra brainpower to notice when it's being done and when it's not. I can see myself re-reading code because I've forgotten how it works by the time I've reached the end of the class.
I think in many ways PHP is a lost cause. It simply has too much baggage that to get it to a point where it's good would mean changing so much it's unrecognisable.
That said, it's the language I'm currently using in my job, and I think that most of these changes are for the better.
I also think they're awkward to look at. I see the same happening in Javascriptland, with new syntaxes which either look completely alien or look too close to a different syntax and mean you need to know multiple ways of doing the same thing in order to read anyone else's code. And there are far too many hacks where PHP developers have tried to standardise things their own way and turned the whole thing into an XKCD-style warning to their fellow humans.
Looking forward to most of those changes, but some things like constructor promotion are definitely going to take extra brainpower to notice when it's being done and when it's not. I can see myself re-reading code because I've forgotten how it works by the time I've reached the end of the class.
PHP was never a lost cause and I do not believe it will ever be.
I never understood the random hatred towards PHP, mostly from developers sitting on high horses, judging on the OOP part or whatever.
PHP is always evolving, which is the key of its success, and the key of its popularity. The same thing is happening with JavaScript.
Just remember, PHP is not general purpose language, it is just for web development, and it does a great job at it.
I agree but to correct things, PHP is indeed a General-purpose language. It can do more than just web related stuff