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by maratd 5357 days ago
> but I don't see the justification for the bindTo() method.

The new array syntax, closures, binding ... I'm surprised you're not seeing the pattern. All of these features are borrowed from JavaScript. Absolutely fine by me. I already spend most of my time in JavaScript anyway. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone, hence the changes.
1 comments
Udo 5357 days ago
So it's desirable to eventually converge PHP and JavaScript? You're right: I don't get it. Why then have PHP at all? I'm not saying that retrofitting a language is a bad idea per se, I just don't see the appeal of doing it when there was a perfectly fine alternative to begin with. The new array syntax is great, and introducing closures was way overdue, but this one..?

Oh well, it's in there now, so I guess there is no point of discussing it. But I do believe, on a more general note, that saying "no" to features is important - and bindTo() would have been an excellent point to say no to. For better or worse, PHP is not JavaScript and vice versa. Their paradigms are not really compatible to begin with. Transplanting stuff from one to the other just because it saves 7 bytes in developers' brains is not enough of a reason to do that in my opinion.

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maratd 5357 days ago
> So it's desirable to eventually converge PHP and JavaScript?

PHP has always been about making coding easy and fun. Since more people are doing JavaScript, it only makes sense to make things familiar.

> Why then have PHP at all?

That's a question that will have to be answered soon.

For now, the answer that I'm coming up with, is that with PHP-FPM you can make PHP properly threaded. All of the server-side JavaScript implementations are event driven. The threaded model has advantages when jobs are cpu or io heavy.

Right now, I'm working on an implementation where Node.js is receiving calls via websockets and handing that off to PHP-FPM via FastCGI for processing. A hybrid system like that has advantages of both the event model and the thread model.

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Udo 5357 days ago
> Right now, I'm working on an implementation where Node.js is receiving calls via websockets and handing that off to PHP-FPM via FastCGI for processing. A hybrid system like that has advantages of both the event model and the thread model. <

That sounds pretty cool. Personally, I was blown away what difference Nginx<->PHP-FPM makes compared to the old Apache way of doing things. Nginx is an absurdly fast evented web server as well. It would be very interesting to bring this kind of thing to Node.js because it would allow for some awesome customization which just isn't possible with Nginx.

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