I recently revisited some of the earliest web code I ever wrote, which was in PHP 5.5 (about 7 years old, I think). I wasn't surprised by all the mistakes I made, both from being a newbie programmer and from making what I think were fairly easy-to-make PHP mistakes. After all, every tutorial I could find back then used mysql, didn't used real_escape_string, etc.<p>What was surprising was how hard I had to dig <i>now, 7 years later</i> to find out how to do things correctly in PHP 7. Searching for what I thought should be fairly common things to do seemed to bring up all of the old articles that I first mislearned from, and it was really hard to find things like what the best way to iterate over a mysql result set was.<p>Honestly, after putting my 7 years of experience to practice, the final code didn't look half bad, but I don't think I'll ever end up using PHP since it still appears to be <i>very easy</i> to write bad code. Maybe if a definitive guide for how to write good PHP shows up, I'll give it a shot (or maybe I'll just try Hack).
<i>Notable New Stuff in Core</i><p>- list() Reference Assignment<p><pre><code> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/list_reference_assignment
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this allows using list() function for reference assignment instead of just assigning to new variables<p>- Flexible Heredoc and Nowdoc Syntaxes<p><pre><code> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/flexible_heredoc_nowdoc_syntaxes
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This makes using HEREDOC blocks much more friendly looking for spaces/tab usages in code<p><i>Other stuff</i><p>Just a lot of updates and bugfixes to many extensions
Maybe I should take this as an opportunity to write a new app in PHP. I've been too deep into Go for awhile to have any sense for where PHP's at these days.