[mojuba]

I'm just wondering, why should it take 15 years to get operators [] and -> to work with any subexpression (and to my knowledge it's still not 100% there)? Shouldn't it be implied and kind of automatic in a programming language?

Or why should it take 15 years to adopt [...] as an array constructor in a language where arrays are one of the central data structures?

Here is opinion No. 823,664,783 about PHP from a long time PHP developer: it sucks (for me) because somehow I don't have a sense that the language itself is in good hands. I'm not sure if, say, they introduce a new basic operator in expressions and that it will not take another 15 years until it makes full programming sense.

[rizalp]

It is indeed in bad hands. No language designer / guru ever that I know ever come close to exploring its Good parts. I'm talking Anders Hejlsberg / James Gosling / Douglas Crockford level here...

[PommeDeTerre]

I wouldn't say that Crockford really "explored JavaScript's good parts".

Rather, he just covered parts of JavaScript that shouldn't be used, and whatever wasn't completely broken was considered to be "good". It isn't truly good, however. It's just not "severely bad" like the rest of JavaScript is.

[jtreminio]

PHP Core is not some Mount Olympus, if you have C skills you can contribute!