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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP7 and types
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 07/12/2015 11:16 AM, Marcio Almada wrote:
> Stas,
>
> 2015-07-12 5:10 GMT-03:00 Stanislav Malyshev <smalyshev@gmail.com>:
>> Hi!
>>
>>> Not completely bogus. At least with typed properties you won't need to
>>> actually write the docblocks to have the IDE "hints". It's a minor win
>>> for IDE users too.
>> I don't see "not needing to write docblocks" as a win, quite the
>> contrary.
> Of course it's a win. Or do you like to write docblocks for every
> single class property or method (even when the member is obvious) just
> to have a "@var" so your IDE can work?
>
> Not to mention you won't get any runtime/compile time check or
> optimization from docblock tags, that's the main point of having typed
> properties.
>
>> In fact, in a number of projects I worked with, code without
>> proper documentation (including docblocks) simply wasn't accepted into
>> the repository.
>>
> If you are using the term "proper documentation" to justify docblocks
> everywhere even if they contain just a "/** @var string */", it's a
> sign we've been using comments against us all this time (even if we
> called it "doc comments").
>
> But thankfully we are moving PHP to another direction. Do you remember
> the "return types" voting results?
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/return_types#vote. That's because "function()
> : type" is self documented and much more maintainable than than a
> possibly sloppy "/** @return type */" on top of every method on a
> codebase.
>
>> While I don't think this needs to be mandatory, I also don't see major
>> difference - so you have to write type instead of docblock, you still
>> have to write something.
>>
> But with the benefits already cited above. Docblocks should not be a
> place for type information anymore, this was a workaround and we've
> been slowly replacing it with a better solution (opt in types).
> Property types seems to be the next logical step after adding return
> types and scalar types.

I don't know why we're even talking about IDEs here.  IDE 
auto-completion isn't the point, anymore than it was the point for 
scalar type hints or return type hints.  It's about the language doing 
type checking for you and static analysis, so that the language can find 
bugs for you. Eg:

class Foo {
   public Bar $bar;
}

$f = new Foo();
$f->bar = new Baz(); // This line is clearly wrong and the compiler can 
check it for you.

That's what the benefit would be.  Easier IDE auto-completion is a nice 
extra, but not the main goal.

+1 from me in 7.1.

--Larry Garfield