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Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:05:41 -0500
To: Sean Coates <sean@caedmon.net>
Sender: Ilia Alshanetsky <iliaal@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Namespaces in PHP 6 - ++$take
From: ilia@prohost.org (Ilia Alshanetsky)


On 10-Nov-06, at 12:41 PM, Sean Coates wrote:

> I don't think namespaces are a magic bullet. As it stands, it's
> impossible to use namespaces without a third party patch that may  
> or may
> not work. I strongly believe that if namespaces are implemented in PHP
> 6, most of our prefixing/symbol collisions will go away as people
> migrate. It's much easier to track down a failed import than to  
> comment
> out a function declaration in the PHP source.

PHP 6 is not yet out and probably won't be production quality for  
quite some time. Which means that migration to it en mass is probably  
not going to happen this decade :-). If we take 5.x adoption as a  
benchmark it took it over 2 years to even reach the 10% mark and big  
PHP apps still (with good reason) focus on the much larger PHP 4  
market. Namespacing core classes/function would be a supremely bad  
idea as it could quite literally break every single application. You  
also need to consider that until PHP X attains at least 50% or more  
market penetration few people would be willing to write applications  
that require this version of PHP to work. This is why many of the  
projects and companies I am familiar still write new code in PHP 4  
rather then in PHP 5, despite that version having numerous perceived  
advantages.

> I also don't deny that there will be a minor performance hit. There  
> are
> a ton of other things in PHP that reduce performance.. the idea is to
> find a balance of which ones are worth it (as we did with OOP and
> Unicode), and I believe that namespaces are worth it. I also know that
> I'm not alone in this.

I think adoption rates speak for themselves, I think there is far  
more demand for a fast & stable PHP then for syntatic sugar features  
which seem extremely useful, but in the end prove to carry too much  
baggage.

Ilia Alshanetsky