[deanclatworthy]

I've been coding in PHP for almost 20 years now. I think I can count on one hand the number of times where I have had an issue regarding inconsistent function signatures. It becomes second nature, and if I forget, the documentation is available online or in worst case built into my IDE.

I can understand why people make this into such a pain point, but quite frankly it isn't for anyone who works day in day out with PHP.

[mgkimsal]

23 years here (php/fi in jan '96) and I probably hit the 'parameter order' issue more than you. I still need to look param order stuff multiple times per year. Normally I can get it in the IDE, but doing remote vim stuff, for example, I need to look it up.

Yes, it's technically a non-zero problem. I get it. Having spent several years in the Java/Spring world, the classic ASP world, and the Perl world... they all have problems, both with the languages and the ecosystems. There will always be people who will throw out Rust or Go or Erlang as 'better' by some metric.

For the types of projects I work on, the modern PHP stacks of the last 5-6 years are all probably the best ROI. Colleagues/friends are running medium-sized SaaS on Rails, and it works, but we compare headaches sometimes, and it's not carefree in the Rails world. There's issues there. Regardless of whether your language is 'clean' or 'discoverable', the rest of the ecosystem can still present problems.

[kbenson]

Since you mentioned Perl, I wonder if you've tried Mojolicious at all and what you think of it? I've found it pretty nice to work in, and easily scalable to small and large projects.

That said, I don't have is a lot of experience with other frameworks in other languages to compare it to, so I don't exactly know how it compares.

[Klathmon]

That's what really gets me.

Anyone that works with PHP on a daily basis very quickly gets used to some of the naming differences or inconsistent signatures. Anyone that works with PHP rarely is almost assuredly going to have to look it up regardless of how inconsistent it is. (do people really guess at function names, signatures, and return values in other languages!? I've guessed that they exist, but I don't ever think i've tried something without first checking the docs just to see about any surprises or differences)

Consistency is nice to have, but it's pretty far down the list of requirements in my opinion. If it's different for some, I can see how they wouldn't like PHP, but calling for it to "clean up" it's syntax in a giant "python-3-esque" move seem really misguided. People who program in PHP regularly don't really mind the warts, and the language has improved significantly in areas that it's users found most important. Types slowly working their way into the language, easy closures, traits, nice new operators, and the massive speed and memory usage improvements have all been very welcome improvements that have made me more productive in the language.

The time spent on "cleaning up" the standard library would be a welcome change by most, but it wouldn't really have any material impact for me or any of the other PHP devs I know.

[Moru]

For a while it was popular to just create your own functions with your own naming convention and parameter order, easy to do and you have whatever order is sane for you. Lots of frameworks around now so you don't even have to do that any more.

[rplnt]

See, I code php very rarely, I review php code a bit more often, and I stumble upon these inconsistencies all the time. So because you got used to something bad doesn't mean it's not bad.