[pbowyer]

WordPress core team members and users are welcome to get involved in PHP development and providing feedback on proposals.

They are notably absent, and so people who write modern PHP - or wish PHP was a different language - are the ones influencing language development.

[chipotle_coyote]

> And so people who ... wish PHP was a different language are the ones influencing language development.

That's definitely been my impression. I used to be a professional PHP developer, still use it occasionally for personal projects, and appreciate the language, warts and all, even if I can't truly say I love* it -- but I'm only half-joking when I quip that PHP has evolved from its roots as a cargo cult version of Perl into a cargo cult version of Java.

[adimitrov]

> - but I'm only half-joking when I quip that PHP has evolved from its roots as a cargo cult version of Perl into a cargo cult version of Java.

It's a joke in so far as it is funny - but it's absolutely correct. When you only look at the language... When looking at the VM, Java has an absolutely world class VM, with great engineering and decades worth of research poured into it.

PHP has... no such thing.

[chipotle_coyote]

I was definitely talking about the syntax. I'm not a huge fan of Java (as I suppose the joke already demonstrated), but I also notice how many places start out with PHP or Ruby or Python and end up moving to, if not Java, a language running on the JVM. So I still appreciate it. :)

To give PHP its due, it can be very fast -- although the more you use it "the modern, right way," the slower it seems to get. I can't help but wonder how much of that is an impedance mismatch between "your program starts over from scratch with every HTTP request" and "structure your program so that by the time every class is instantiated and interface is implemented, ten thousand lines of code have been processed with each request." No matter how great its optimization and caching may be, a Laravel or Symfony app just has a whole lot of overhead relative to any framework in another language that doesn't have PHP's zero-state approach.

[mmerlin]

"by the time every class is instantiated and interface is implemented, ten thousand lines of code have been processed with each request."

Haha so true... the first time I stepped through a running Laravel app line-by-line in debug mode in order to understand it better, I was worried my F11 key was going to wear out ;)

[slifin]

PHP has an initial implementation on GraalVM

That is completely ignored by the community

[cutler]

A world class VM tied to a dinosaur language in which you still have to escape regex metacharacters.

[chipotle_coyote]

The JVM is not tied to Java, which I think was a large part of adimitrov's observation. Kotlin, Scala and Clojure immediately come to mind. JRuby is also a fairly popular platform for Ruby. There's actually a huge list of other languages that run on the JVM, though.

[The_rationalist]

What are you talking about? Java has raw strings (autoescaping) https://openjdk.java.net/jeps/378 Moreover Kotlin allows to have a state of the art language in a state of the art vm

[im3w1l]

Having no stake in this, I think that's a mistaken way of going about things. Wordpress is PHP's killer app. If people aren't getting involved, php team should consider outreach.

[pbowyer]

Part of the problem is PHP has no team. It's determined to be a meritocratic loose organisation of individuals, and so there's no entity to do outreach.

It's not my favoured governance model, but it is what it is.