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Date: Wed, 29 Feb 2012 23:53:06 -0500
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To: Sebastian Bergmann <sebastian@php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Scalar Type Intentions
From: adamjonr@gmail.com (Adam Jon Richardson)

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First, phpunit is a fantastic tool! I'm thankful for your contributions to
all of the PHP community (especially with the code coverage capabilities.)

I speak to your 2 points inline below:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 9:36 PM, Sebastian Bergmann <sebastian@php.net>wrote:

> On 02/29/2012 09:01 PM, Adam Jon Richardson wrote:
>
>> However, the aliases would allow developers to better communicate
>> intentions AND provide more information for IDE's and static analyses
>> tools.
>>
>
>  1) You are trying to solve a social problem through technology. That
>    usually does not work.
>

I believe technology can provide effective tools for social problems,
although I won't go so far as to say that it usually does work. More
importantly, I believe programming is riddled with social problems:

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs.
Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to
do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a
computer to do."

D. Knuth

 2) What you want to achieve is already possible through docblocks.


The greater part of the proposal rests on the general scalar hint. That
said, I still believe the aliases for the scalars hold value. Sure, the
communicative aspect of the aliases can be achieved through use of
docblocks. However, in cognitive psychology and human factors research,
 proximity of relevant information plays a role in perception and
processing, and I would posit that code with the type intentions displayed
closer to the actual body of the function would hold benefits (this would
be very testable, though, and research could prove me wrong.) When
available, the scalar aliases could then be used to help auto-generate the
docblocks.

I would appreciate the scalar hinting, along with the aliases I outlined
very much in my code. I believe that this form of hinting stays true to the
PHP principles outlined in Richard's PHP Philosophy thread (a great read),
and I believe it helps developers who want to better enforce (scalar
hinting) and communicate (scalar aliases) the intentions of their code.

Thank you for the feedback,

Adam

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