Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:92310
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.192.177 as permitted sender)
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CAFMT4Nq+VdfYS+eKbdbmPr92-X1QYCE2eOtPGo6Zu1qgAOGkhA@mail.gmail.com>
 <CAFMT4Nq=QPN9fOMtKa7GDDkf-AECAXjN9WRtn84nUjtKK-zD7w@mail.gmail.com>
 <570E99AC.3090804@fleshgrinder.com>
 <CAFMT4Nq7JV=iv=_AKjez+B8JxZ+rucD4LkEJgHuUg15o7r2hMg@mail.gmail.com>
 <570EA5EB.8090501@fleshgrinder.com> <570EAB0D.6080706@gmail.com>
 <570EB67E.8010908@garfieldtech.com>
 <5B147E88-CC0A-4CBC-A49D-C7FE3BF557C0@zend.com>
 <6F.C3.12455.94C5F075@pb1.pair.com> <20160414094440.GF19347@phcomp.co.uk>
 <CAKSD0w6Gd7uN2L=d3VfnK-Mj+cwjpcGtCpjfD6iq+VMmJVxkhA@mail.gmail.com>
 <570FD94F.90703@fleshgrinder.com>
Message-ID: <570FE8A9.4020809@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:59:53 -0700
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:38.0)
 Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.7.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <570FD94F.90703@fleshgrinder.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Improving PHP's type system
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> I don't know what is complicated about "string|Stringable" or "Foo|Bar"
> since it is super self-explanatory. However, I find myself checking the

It may be self-explanatory for you. It's much less self-explanatory for
somebody just starting to learn. It is also very dangerous - if it's
either Foo or Bar, can you call Foo::stuff on it or not? If it's string
or not string, can you call strlen on it? Etc., etc. It adds a lot of
cognitive load and complicates the whole picture. You may have a
specific use case where it is useful (which we have yet to see btw) but
please remember it's a language with literally millions of use cases and
users.

> docs (IDE or online) in which order I need to pass arguments to one of
> the various mixed up functions in the core all the time.

Which takes about 0.5 seconds. Can we please not waste time on
discussing argument order some 9000th time?

> PHP is not easy, it has so many quirks that one needs to know of that
> you could make a PhD only for that.

PHP has some quirks, but it doesn't take PhD to look up argument order
in a manual. Anyway, having super-complicated type algebra does not help
any with argument order, so I'm not sure why it's brought here at all.

> https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
> 
> This contains A LOT of that stuff.

Oh, could we please stop referring to this list of nitpicks each time we
discuss the language? About 90% of it is not worth the bytes spent on it
for discussing it again and again. Using it as some kind of magic "some
guy wrote article bashing PHP, therefore my proposals need to be
accepted" card makes no sense at all.

-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com