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Date: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 14:09:35 +0000
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 Leigh <leight@gmail.com>,
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To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hints v0.2
From: ajf@ajf.me (Andrea Faulds)

Hi Zeev,

> On 15 Jan 2015, at 11:56, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
>=20
> Andrea,
>=20
> I'm not sure what you're basing that assumption on.  The incidental
> interactions you (or anybody) may have with 'the community', by no way
> represent the opinion of the community at large.  The vast majority of =
the
> PHP community never ever interacts with internals@, never attend
> conferences, don't write blog posts about PHP and are generally =
completely
> 'under the radar'.  I would actually go to argue that the people who =
do
> attend conferences, participate on internals@ or write blog posts - =
are not
> representative of the PHP userbase at large.  The vast majority of
> developers I bump into - you will never ever hear from.  They =
constitute the
> vast majority of the ~5M strong PHP developer base.
>=20
> So even though my belief / educated guess is that the vast majority of =
the
> PHP userbase would prefer to see strict typing kept off this language, =
I'm
> not going to argue that - but we must not argue the opposite either, =
based
> on the non-representative anecdotal data from a few dozen people.

Whether or not they are in the majority, a very large portion of PHP =
developers would prefer strict typing. In particular, the most vocal =
ones would seem to. There are also a lot of PHP developers who would =
prefer weak typing. Thus we have a problem: either approach to scalar =
hints will upset a large portion of the community.

>=20
>> Myself, I might have been somewhat happy with just weak hints, but
>> it would upset an awful lot of developers who would like some measure =
of
>> strict typing. Developers who would most likely not use the new =
scalar
>> type
>> hints, because they weren=E2=80=99t strict. And if nobody uses them, =
why add them?
>=20
> How do you deduce that 'nobody uses them' from the fact that some =
group of
> people said they won't?  I'm sorry, but it makes no sense, especially =
given
> the positive feedback you saw on internals, making it clear that there =
would
> be in fact people using it.

Not all of it was positive. Sure, a lot of people would use them though, =
but I=E2=80=99ve heard quite a few developers say they wouldn=E2=80=99t =
use them and continue to use manual (!is_int($foo))-style assertions.

> If there's one thing that's worse than introducing an alien concept =
like
> strict typing into PHP, it's introducing it as a feature that will =
include
> all the negatives of this alien concept, PLUS have the ability to =
radically
> change how it behaves based on a runtime option.

This isn=E2=80=99t a runtime option, it is entirely compile-time. Much =
like namespaces are not a runtime option. There isn=E2=80=99t even the =
ability to toggle it at runtime, unless we somehow add some ability to =
edit the flags on individual opcodes.

Thanks.

--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/