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by nicholaides 4843 days ago
I'm not familiar with the PHP ecosystem. Is the author making fun something other than obvious over-engineering? Does he or she feel like that's a problem in the PHP ecosystem?

I'm criticizing, because it's funny. I'm just trying to figure out if theres some wisdom being conveyed that I'm missing.

3 comments

I think he is mocking the general pattern of over-engineering and PHP just happens to be the language he wrote this in.

At least PHP is not a language known for massive over-engineering. Usually people associate the exact contrary with PHP.

But there is indeed a recent trend towards better object oriented designs in PHP and with it comes also more over-engineered code. But I have yet to see any Java-style absurdity. Maybe we'll still get to that ;)

> I have yet to see any Java-style absurdity.

Then you probably haven't tried Zend Framework ;)

So what am I in for with Drupal 8 since the two communities are combining?
Drupal 8 will use Symfony2 components, not Zend.
Thanks for correcting me msp. I must have misread that!
Don't you think that, when it comes to OOP features, PHP recklessly introduced lots of Javaisms which lose lot of sense when applied to a dynamically typed language? I believe the author had exactly that in mind.
definitely not. can you name one feature that has been added that isn't useful to a dynamically typed language?

The only one i can think of is object type hinting which alone isn't that big of a deal.

Umm... Interfaces? Abstract methods and classes? Finals?
Yeah ... Take a look at Drupal 8 and you'll start to see this creeping in. I overheard Dries saying he wants to see Java style comments and wants to be more like Java.
> Does he or she feel like that's a problem in the PHP ecosystem?

Well, I can't talk for the author, but there is some over-egineering going on in the ecosystem, that's undeniable. I think that since the reputation of the language is low, there's this need to make sure the code doesn't look amateur, which ultimately drives overusing classes and OOP design patterns for the sake of using them.

No, you could do this in any OO language. The author is just being silly.