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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 12:22:59 -0600
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To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
Cc: Clint Priest <cpriest@zerocue.com>, Peter Cowburn <petercowburn@gmail.com>, 
	Pierre Joye <pierre.php@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
From: leverton@gmail.com (Matthew Leverton)

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
> The vast majority of the PHP community is a silent one;  These people
> ...
> In fact, they're not completely silent.  They speak in volumes
> - PHP 5.4 is used in less than 1% of the sites using PHP today, and even
> the relatively revolutionary 5.3 is still a lot less popular than 5.2.
> The new shiny features are not all that interesting for most people.
>
Can we stop calling things "new shiny features" as if that means
anything? It's empty rhetoric. When you treat your users like
unintelligent noobies who are just going to hang themselves when you
give them a rope, then that's the type of users you will end up with.
As a long time (silent) PHP user of 10+ years, these are exactly the
types of features that I and *everybody* I work with as professionals
who write our own code would like to see in PHP. The second PHP 5.5 is
out, I'll be updating just to have easy-to-use iterators (i.e.,
generators).

As somebody who has been actively involved on another large open
source project for 15 years, I can appreciate the desire to avoid
adding pointless complexity. In fact, I think putting properties into
something already in alpha state (5.5) is not wise. But the feature
itself is spot-on, and to claim that using __get and __set is better
or sufficient is a hard position to back up.

Pointing to usage of PHP 5.4 as any sort of justification is
meaningless. What's happening is that the average PHP user is simply
turning into a person who uses few old, mainstream PHP applications
like Wordpress because PHP lacks the features to be competitive with
other languages. So it's things like Wordpress that are driving the
big numbers, which has nothing to do with the number of individual
people who write their own serious, modern software.

And for the discussion at hand, yes, it seems obvious that every RFC
should have an absolute deadline of when voting ends.

--
Matthew Leverton