[grumpycanuck]

I'm a long-time PHP user (since 1998) but I never really peered inside the discussions of the internals of PHP. Now that I'm more connected to others in the PHP world, what you see inside the mailing list for PHP internals is what I would label as obstructionism and an attitude that seems to imply that if you cannot code the requested changes yourself, don't even bother asking.

Lead, follow, or get out of the way are the only three choices available to any language.

[hackernewz]

Also, if you can code the change yourself it gets rejected as "not a bug" for a few times, then they think about it and say that it's too late for any reasonable release and that it will go into PHP 6 or 5.3 or something that you won't upgrade too because it breaks too much other stuff.

[wvenable]

> attitude that seems to imply that if you cannot code the requested changes yourself, don't even bother asking.

I think that's fair actually. The internals list is not for wish-lists; if it was it would be flooded and no useful work could be done there. The problem is that there are coded patches for some of these features (like short array syntax) but they're still not being included.

[philolson]

It's not productive and everyone loses with that attitude, because "... don't even bother asking" essentially blames others for not implementing ideas stuck in your head.