I always felt they focused on the wrong thing with all these improvements. PHP 5 as a language after 5.4/5.5 or so was okay; not great, but okay, or at least workable enough. It has footguns and issues but you can deal with those with a bit of practice. I always considered the standard library to be a far bigger problem.
For example, as near as I can tell I still can't have fopen() tell me why it failed; it just returns False and one of those magic E_WARNING things. This is simple stuff, but also pretty critical to correctly implement some basic file I/O of the kind that you can do in ... pretty much any other language.
Language blitz is nice, I guess, but not really "needed" as such. PHP5-the-language never really prevented me from doing things, PHP5-the-standard-library did, and from the looks of it, it still does. Things like no $ or ; are non-issues, and a good example of the wrong focus on syntax and "blitz" rather than things that actually matter.
I'm not expecting things to be free of inconsistencies, oddities, historical baggage, etc. I just want ... basic functionality.
For example, as near as I can tell I still can't have fopen() tell me why it failed; it just returns False and one of those magic E_WARNING things. This is simple stuff, but also pretty critical to correctly implement some basic file I/O of the kind that you can do in ... pretty much any other language.
Language blitz is nice, I guess, but not really "needed" as such. PHP5-the-language never really prevented me from doing things, PHP5-the-standard-library did, and from the looks of it, it still does. Things like no $ or ; are non-issues, and a good example of the wrong focus on syntax and "blitz" rather than things that actually matter.
I'm not expecting things to be free of inconsistencies, oddities, historical baggage, etc. I just want ... basic functionality.