Honestly, how can languages (what PHP in the end boils down to) possibly evolve?
Example: you cannot bolt OO to it later on, PHP, Perl and to some lesser extend even Python are a testimony to that. It just does not feel right, leads to syntactic horrors and is usually not very performant.
Neither can you modify the syntax. You can add to it. But not much modify existing syntax. For tiny changes all hell breaks loose.
> [...] and feel like they're doing the wider community a service by making declaring a religious war against PHP.
I think the religious-war card is clearly overused. This is not a religious-war, it is an effort by programmers who rather use the best tool for the job then the bizniz/customer dictating them a languages/framework/CMS. PHP will not be fixed, mission impossible, they know it and therefor advocate a retreat-strategy.
The article describes that the community has (be it very late) finally developed some tool, a package manager, that make it slightly more bearable. But the language and its community still suffer the exact same unfixable problems.
An analogy: even in COBOL-land some problems get fixed up until today, but not fundamental language issues, nor community issues.
Yes, I compare COBOL with PHP. Many, or most, languages will someday be 'legacy' languages. Some just a little sooner then others. :)
I'm not sure why you're getting modded down, I think you make a very obvious point. There is a programming language (syntax) and there are libraries. PHP syntax is not informed by much of Computer Science of the 30 past years, and it can't be fixed, that would be a new language. Frameworks can evolve and as long as the syntax allows enough, can be as amazing as anyone bothers to engineer them. This has nothing to do with how good a language actually is.
> But it has.
Honestly, how can languages (what PHP in the end boils down to) possibly evolve?
Example: you cannot bolt OO to it later on, PHP, Perl and to some lesser extend even Python are a testimony to that. It just does not feel right, leads to syntactic horrors and is usually not very performant.
Neither can you modify the syntax. You can add to it. But not much modify existing syntax. For tiny changes all hell breaks loose.
> [...] and feel like they're doing the wider community a service by making declaring a religious war against PHP.
I think the religious-war card is clearly overused. This is not a religious-war, it is an effort by programmers who rather use the best tool for the job then the bizniz/customer dictating them a languages/framework/CMS. PHP will not be fixed, mission impossible, they know it and therefor advocate a retreat-strategy.
The article describes that the community has (be it very late) finally developed some tool, a package manager, that make it slightly more bearable. But the language and its community still suffer the exact same unfixable problems.
An analogy: even in COBOL-land some problems get fixed up until today, but not fundamental language issues, nor community issues.
Yes, I compare COBOL with PHP. Many, or most, languages will someday be 'legacy' languages. Some just a little sooner then others. :)