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Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2020 21:48:18 -0400
Cc: Benjamin Eberlei <kontakt@beberlei.de>,
 PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Message-ID: <76FEBA49-6CB7-4AC1-AD47-CED6175AB3C8@newclarity.net>
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To: Matthew Brown <matthewmatthew@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Attributes v2
From: mike@newclarity.net (Mike Schinkel)

> On Mar 9, 2020, at 9:36 PM, Matthew Brown <matthewmatthew@gmail.com> =
wrote:
>=20
> Saying "the syntax makes my eyes bleed" is slightly useless feedback.

That was just a header.  There was elaboration right below it:

"I find angle brackets extremely hard to read and fear =E2=80=94 having =
trained many newbies in programming =E2=80=94 that it will cause newbies =
who see PHP to think it is too complex for them to consider learning."

And there was a proposed alternative.

> You could say "it's hard to scan", but I don't even think that's true =
=E2=80=93 prepending everything << makes it easy to pick out attributes =
in plain text at a glance,

Not for me.  Seeing the word "attributes" is far easier for me than =
seeing "<<" and ">>."  =20

I do of course understand YMMV.

> Additionally this syntax has effectively been battle-tested at scale =
already in PHP-like codebases =E2=80=93 thousands of engineers at =
Facebook and Slack have used it over the last few years, and been =
productive with it.

Yeah, developers who have been vetted by two very successful tech =
companies.=20

Something tells me neither of them hire moderately-to-lower skilled =
developers who work in the trenches at many non high-flying tech =
companies, nor do they hire newbies who are trying to decide if they =
should learn PHP, or learn Javascript/Typescript instead (for example.)

Just registering my objection to the syntax and proposing a readable =
alternative.  I would be highly surprised if there were not many others =
in userland who would feel the same.  But of course I unfortunately have =
no way of validating that belief.

-Mike=