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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Pipe Operator
From: smalyshev@gmail.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

Hi!

> This is one of my favorites out of HackLang.  It's pure syntactic
> sugar, but it goes a long way towards improving readability.
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/pipe-operator

I think this takes the syntax too much towards Perl 6 direction. There
is a lot of fun in inventing cool signs like |> and making them do
nontrivial cool stuff. There's much less fun when you try to figure out
what such code is actually doing - and especially why it is not doing
what you thought it is doing. Brian Kernigan once said:

"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in
the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it,
how will you ever debug it?"

I think this applies not only to debugging, but also to reading programs
in general. If we are "as clever as we can be" with syntax, the program
becomes unreadable.

For this feature specifically, I see nothing wrong with assigning
intermediate results to variables - moreover, I see an advantage to it
both in reading (you tell people what you expect to have happened in
this stage) and in debugging (you can actually *see* what happened and
*check* whether what you thought should be happening actually happened).

If we could achieve the elegance of Unix pipes, I'd agree that it is
simple enough that we can see what is going on - but having it rely on
two magic things which are in different part of expression and
context-dependent ($$ means different things in different places) is too
much for me.

-- 
Stas Malyshev
smalyshev@gmail.com