Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:115053
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <1014AE76-B3D5-48F7-A0F0-B8E3327123A2@gmail.com> <CADyq6sLzPJoube_FT=ARsJX_9WjqBsaSD_3_AWe4==UzimL9pA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <CADyq6sLzPJoube_FT=ARsJX_9WjqBsaSD_3_AWe4==UzimL9pA@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2021 10:28:00 +0200
Message-ID: <CANS-=pckK015-tn+YydoeJgr9_cepuU-PO1QOM2A951xQsP1_g@mail.gmail.com>
To: Marco Pivetta <ocramius@gmail.com>
Cc: Kim Hallberg <hallbergkim@gmail.com>, PHP Internals List <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000bc6b7505c56ab089"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Proposal: clamp
From: kjarli@gmail.com (Lynn)

--000000000000bc6b7505c56ab089
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 3:07 AM Marco Pivetta <ocramius@gmail.com> wrote:

> The problem is exactly the fact that it is trivial to implement in
> userland: why not do it there instead?
>

My 2cents: because people won't use it when the barrier is too high to get
it. There are a ton of great libraries that have functionality like clamp,
and some more elaborate, like an array replacement. In the end -based on my
experience- people go to the php documentation and look for functions that
they can use, or they use their IDE autocomplete functionality to see
what's hinted at. Having these functions spread through the ecosystem means
discoverability is low. I've needed the "clamp" function in the past and
didn't even consider looking for a library to do this for me. Why would I
even install a library to have a single function anyway? It feels like a
massive overhead. I've seen coworkers use funky SPL functionality I didn't
even know existed to avoid using external dependencies that have already
solved their problem in a neat way, which were in fact already installed
through composer. They found the solution through google and ended up in
the official php documentation.

I'd love to see these small additions in the core, they make the language
feel more complete. The fact that they are easy to implement in userland
means that we can have great forward compatibility through polyfills and
already start using them in codebases that haven't been upgraded yet to the
latest PHP version. I've been very happy to have been able to use
str_starts_with, str_ends_with, and str_contains in 7.3, as they came in
with a generic php polyfill.

With a "see also: clamp" in the min/max function documentation, this would
be easy to find as well.

--000000000000bc6b7505c56ab089--