[ragnese]

You're not being fair to the argument #3. PHP is becoming a less good Java. That's the problem. It's like Java, except it doesn't have generics, doesn't have real data structures (List, HashMap, Deque), no threads or async, no method/function reference or typed function parameters, etc.

So the whole "It's trying to be Java" is more like "What does it offer that's better than Java? Because Java has stuff that is better than PHP."

And I'm saying this as someone who doesn't like Java at all.

[francislavoie]

> it doesn't have generics

It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph...

> doesn't have real data structures

Untrue. See https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php It's usefulness is limited though, because it's rare that you need those types of data structures for web applications.

> no threads or async

Untrue. All kinds of projects like Swoole (gives you a runtime similar to Go) and ReactPHP (runtime similar to Node) and https://github.com/krakjoe/parallel for lower level concurrency. There's also pthreads https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pthreads.php But again most of these aren't necessary for most apps because of PHP's request-response model. Useful for one-off services though.

> typed function parameters

Completely untrue. https://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functi...

> no method/function reference

You do those like this: [Example::class, 'someFunction']

I hate it when people write such blatantly misinformed comments. Sigh.

[ragnese]

> It doesn't need them IMO. It brings no benefit to the language, really. They would need to be type checked at runtime, which can become quite expensive. Static analysis is a better option for an interpreted language. Read this answer from Nikita (one of the top PHP contributors) https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/j65968/ama_with_the_ph...

Right. You need to use something like Psalm if you want the benefits of generics, which is basically a tacked on type system. Having static checking is absolutely beneficial. I'd be willing to bet good money that you don't write PHP without typehints and/or Psalm/PHPstan.

> Untrue. See https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.spl.php It's usefulness is limited though, because it's rare that you need those types of data structures for web applications.

You're totally right. I was thinking that you still needed to explicitly enable SPL, but that hasn't been true for a long time, IIRC. So, fair enough. I was wrong here.

> Untrue. All kinds of projects like Swoole (gives you a runtime similar to Go) and ReactPHP (runtime similar to Node) and https://github.com/krakjoe/parallel for lower level concurrency. There's also pthreads https://www.php.net/manual/en/book.pthreads.php But again most of these aren't necessary for most apps because of PHP's request-response model. Useful for one-off services though.

pthreads was never worth much. It never worked on web servers and is now deprecated. Parallel is a PECL extension, which may or may not be considered part of PHP, IMO. I believe it also doesn't use threads unless you use pthreads (which you should/can not). So it's just multiple processes- not threads or async. I don't know much about Swoole, etc, but those are frameworks- not PHP itself. Also, I believe Swoole is process based, not thread or (true) async. I could be mistaken. So, again, AFAIK, PHP does not have threads or async.

> Completely untrue. https://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.arguments.php#functi...

That's not what I meant. My wording was poor. I meant specifically `callable`. You can't typehint the inputs and outputs of `callable` parameters. So passing around lambdas, etc, is not robust/safe.

> You do those like this: [Example::class, 'someFunction']

Yeah... an array of two strings. Again, I should've been more clear. I know that's how you refer to functions in PHP. But it's not the same as actually getting to write Example::someFunction and knowing that the inputs/outputs line up with whatever you're doing. If you're lucky, your PHPStorm or whatever can tell where you're trying to refer to a function and maybe point to it for you, but otherwise, it just thinks you're passing some strings around, because you are.

[francislavoie]

> I'd be willing to bet good money that you don't write PHP without typehints and/or Psalm/PHPstan.

Yeah, think of it like Typescript. Same idea.

> Also, I believe Swoole is process based, not thread or (true) async.

It's a coroutine model, like Go. Very fast. But I don't use it because it's primarily a chinese community, lots of the docs are in broken english. But it's an impressive thing anyways.

IMO, you don't need threading in PHP, there's not really that many situations where it would help during a request-response flow. People generally delegate slow tasks to job queues, which often use https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-fork.php to fork off workers. Works great.

> That's not what I meant. My wording was poor. I meant specifically `callable`. You can't typehint the inputs and outputs of `callable` parameters. So passing around lambdas, etc, is not robust/safe.

You can though. `fn(SomeClass $foo) => $foo->doThing()`

> and knowing that the inputs/outputs line up with whatever you're doing

Fair enough, but you can use reflection to look at the callable if you care enough. It rarely matters.

[przemo_li]

PHP have nice libs as extensions for those data structures. It's std variants that should be avoided.