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Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2024 13:22:42 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Revisiting case-sensitivity in PHP
To: =?UTF-8?Q?Rokas_=C5=A0leinius?= <raveren@gmail.com>
Cc: php internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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From: landers.robert@gmail.com (Robert Landers)

On Fri, Jun 14, 2024 at 6:40=E2=80=AFAM Rokas =C5=A0leinius <raveren@gmail.=
com> wrote:
>
> I'm no one important, but I just want to say for the sake of the
> public image of PHP I hope this does not pass, or at least not in the
> foreseeable future.
>
> There are NO substantial gains to speak of here and the BC break is
> real and it's super annoying when they pile up and up.
>
> Besides, this is slightly off topic, but I don't know if you know, but
> if you take a look at stackoverflow developer survey over the years,
> there has been an absolute 30% drop of php popularity in the past few
> years.
>
> I would guess this is mostly the low-level developers not being fans
> of the language removing magic quotes and other "super useful"
> features. In other words, PHP lost the average joe as its target
> audience. Joe's gone.
>
> Just my 2=C2=A2:
> a) this WAS the reason PHP was great and I loved to rewrite the
> systems of several very successful companies who started out with
> their non-technical founders who coded their way out of the box to
> begin multi-million businesses
> b) the PHP core and co. (a.k.a. YOU) should be acutely aware that the
> language needs to be liked by not only you, dear awesome lovely
> hardcore nerds, but also the users who just need to get stuff done,
> business needs fulfilled.
>
> I know this is not how YOU work, but if you ignore that part of the
> language users, there might eventually not be a language to work on in
> the future.
>
> So please, keep the language loose, I hate the slight inconsistency
> too, but if we ruin the day for another 20% of users, it might even be
> the straw that broke the camel's back.
>
> On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 at 02:38, Valentin Udaltsov
> <udaltsov.valentin@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Friday, 14 June, 2024=E2=80=AF=D0=B3. at 00:04, Timo Tijhof <ttijhof=
@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> Would this affect unserialize()?
> >>
> >> I ask because MediaWiki's main "text" database table is an immutable/a=
ppend-only store where we store the text of each page revision since ~2004.=
 It is stored as serialised blobs of a value class. There have been a numbe=
r of different implementations over the past twenty years of Wikipedia's ex=
istence (plain text, gzip-compressed, diff-compressed, etc.).
> >>
> >> When we adopted modern autoloading in MediaWiki, we quickly found that=
 blobs originally serialized by PHP 4 actually encoded the class in lowerca=
se, regardless of the casing in source code.
> >>
> >> From https://3v4l.org/jl0et:
> >>>
> >>> class ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob {=E2=80=A6}
> >>> print serialize($blob);
> >>> # PHP 4.x: O:27:"concatenatedgziphistoryblob":=E2=80=A6
> >>> # PHP 5/7/8: O:27:"ConcatenatedGzipHistoryBlob":=E2=80=A6
> >>
> >>
> >> It is of course the application's responsibility to load these classes=
, but, it is arguably PHP's responsiblity to be able to construct what it s=
erialized. I suppose anything is possible when announced as a breaking chan=
ge for PHP 9.0. I wanted to share this as something to take into considerat=
ion as part of the impact. Potentially worthy of additional communicating, =
or perhaps worth supporting separately.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Timo Tijhof,
> >> Principal Engineer,
> >> Wikimedia Foundation.
> >> https://timotijhof.net/
> >>
> >
> > Hi, Timo!
> >
> > Thank you very much for bringing up this important case.
> >
> > Here's how I see this. If PHP gets class case-sensitivity, unserializat=
ion of classes with lowercase names will fail. This is because the engine w=
ill start putting `MyClass` class entry with key `MyClass` (not `myclass`) =
into the loaded classes table and serialization will not be able to find it=
 as `myclass`.
> > Even if some deprecation layer is introduced (that puts both `myclass` =
and `MyClass` keys into the table), you will first have a ton of notices an=
d then eventually end up with the same problem, when transition to case sen=
sitivity is complete. Hence I propose no deprecation layer =E2=80=94 it doe=
s not really help.
> >
> > However, you will be able to use `class_alias()` to solve your issue. I=
f classes are case-sensitive, `class_alias(MyClass::class, 'myclass');` sho=
uld work, since MyClass !=3D myclass anymore. And serialization works perfe=
ctly with class aliases, see https://3v4l.org/1n1as .
> >
> > --
> > Valentin Udaltsov
> >

Hey Rokas,

Please bottom post (it's the rules), but PHP's "decline" has little to
do with the language itself, most likely it has to do with how long
people have been coding. >42% of people have been programming less
than 9 years, and >62% for less than 14. "Hyped up" languages tend to
dominate in the earlier years of programming and even then, most of
the developers responding to that survey classify themselves as
"full-stack" (and from talking to "full-stack" developers, it mostly
tends to mean they know Javascript -- which lo-and-behold, is the top
language; surprise surprise).

I wouldn't put too much weight on that survey since it is clearly
biased towards early-career devs, in the US, who know Javascript.
Fortunately, the industry is much bigger than that.

Robert Landers
Software Engineer
Utrecht NL