Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:121749
MIME-Version: 1.0
References: <79d675e3-95b4-40bb-baf4-3e1c998f5390@online-presence.ca>
In-Reply-To: <79d675e3-95b4-40bb-baf4-3e1c998f5390@online-presence.ca>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2023 21:56:14 +0000
Message-ID: <CA+p1FaZMPyReJMAn7YQyZFFiHr=v3nHEav-a_0DZKkZ9nJyn1w@mail.gmail.com>
To: Lanre Waju <lanre@online-presence.ca>
Cc: "internals@lists.php.net" <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="00000000000085508f060ab0ac7a"
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] RFC Proposal - static modifier for classes
From: davidgebler@gmail.com (David Gebler)

--00000000000085508f060ab0ac7a
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

I wouldn't support this, personally. I'm not a voter but I mean just in
terms of gauging community feel about the proposal, without unnecessarily
repeating what's already been said I just want to register that I'm in
agreement with Larry and Kamil's comments.

What static classes would achieve goes against the design principles of
what a class is and what it's for. Others have noted we already have an
adequate namespacing system and via Composer which is a de facto standard
in almost all PHP projects today, a means to autoload namespaced functions.

But more than that, I think for me - look, I get a lot of language features
which are sincerely useful can be argued to be just convenient syntax sugar
for things you could technically already do another way. But when I
consider features like readonly properties, constructor promotion and
readonly classes, I think the functional change goes beyond just syntax
sugar. You're getting an enormous saving versus say, trying to make a class
with all properties readonly in PHP 7.4. It's not just a little bit of
boilerplate trimmed down, it's you now have to write one line of code
instead of fifty.

So even if I supported the idea of static classes in principle, I'd still
be looking at it and thinking really the only convenience, the only syntax
sugar here is that you now have to type the word static N-1 fewer times
where N is the number of properties and functions in your class. This is
not a huge benefit or saving to me. While I wouldn't encourage anyone to
design their code this way, for the same reasons Larry has articulated, if
you want to design your code this way you already can at basically the same
cost of your time and effort and same cost to the PHP engine.

I think there'd need to be some persuasively more substantial gain for
either the developer or the execution of a script for this proposal to be
worth anything.

Thanks.

-David

--00000000000085508f060ab0ac7a--