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Date: Fri, 19 Feb 2016 21:05:09 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC Proposal] var keyword deprecation/removal
From: php@fleshgrinder.com (Fleshgrinder)

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On 2/18/2016 10:53 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> This is all generic advice which is nice and well if we would be 
> designing language anew. As it is, we are not - we already have
> lots of code using var. For code not using var, removing var does
> not do anything. For code using var, removing var means no upgrade.
> It is unnecessary breakage for the sake of feeling that we follow
> the advice somebody put on the website. That feeling is not worth
> very real work that people would have to do to achieve what they
> already have now.

I would not say that the information that the Nielsen Norman Group
puts on their website falls in the category of "somebody putting
something on a website".

https://www.nngroup.com/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_Norman_Group

Additionally there is other scientific work that supports what I
stated, e.g.:

http://www.eecs.yorku.ca/research/techreports/1999/CS-1999-08.pdf

On 2/18/2016 10:53 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:
> Yes, PHP has aliases. Nothing wrong with that, provided you bother
> to look in the manual once, and then you are enlightened forever. 
> [...] It only wastes their time if they don't read the manual but
> instead chat on Stackoverflow :) Which I have nothing against, it's
> just not the reason to introduce BC breaks because somebody asked a
> question about it.

A lot of things are wrong with this (see above reasons) and the RTFM
argument is a thought-terminating cliché. Duplication harms the
overall design of a language, it results in a maintainability burden
for the developers, hell, even this discussion is only happening and
wasting our time due to these duplications.

I am not saying that your arguments about breaking changes and more
complicated upgrades for a small user base are wrong; I am saying that
these are weak arguments compared to the scientific facts and the
overall progress for the PHP programming language.

After all, we are talking about an upgrade path of several years.
Anyone should be able to adopt by that time and they probably have
other problems until then with their old systems.
- -- 
Richard "Fleshgrinder" Fussenegger
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