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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Scalar Type Hints v0.2
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> And to hell with the "consistency" argument. Since when did PHP become
> *that* concerned about purity and high consistency levels? Call this a

The "purity" part should be addressed to strict proponents - it's their
purist sensibilities that are offended by converting '23' to 23 ;) As
for concern with high consistency - when you have 5M users, you have to
grow up a bit. We used to commit features when we feel like it, release
when it rained on Thursday and our RFC process was "nobody screamed for
a month after I committed it so it's probably OK". Now we have RFC
process, release schedule, CI, votes and nobody seems to be worse off
because of that. We can have more consistency in the language too, and
we won't feel worse because of it either - in fact, we'll be better.

> speculation, but barely a few people care for the the internal
> functions' behavior - most of us will be happy if they stay as is
> regardless of the kind of type-hinting that gets adopted. What we want
> is the features (plural!), not the philosophy.

Actually, we want both. Language is not just a bag of tricks, at least a
good one. It's also an underlying philosophy which allows you to
understand why these tricks work the way they do and how to use them in
most efficient manner. If the tricks are just random, it conflicts with
the pattern-matching nature of human brain and makes it harder to use
it. That's why people see faces on Mars and rabbits on the Moon - people
need patterns they can recognize. If you don't give them the good
patterns, it makes harder to work with the thing.

-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com