Ask YC: PHP6?

I actually like where PHP6 is headed: <a href="http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html</a><p>There are a couple things I don't agree with. Like adding goto statements. Really? Come on...PHP...<p>But it seems PHP6 wants to finally remove old deprecated behavior (registered globals/magic quotes/safe mode) which I think is a good thing.<p>Not to mention namespaces will be a great addition to the language.<p>At first I had an issue upgrading to PHP5. It didn't have the same speed boost PHP3-&#62;PHP4 had, so I didn't see the need to change.<p>But then I actually looked into the new features.<p>The OOP improvements, exceptions, SimpleXML and iterator support are all great features I use daily and wouldn't want to move back to PHP4.

"is php becoming like every other language?" Maybe that's for the better. It'd give everyone using the language a nice reprieve from the usual "hurr lawl php kiddie language!" trolls.

I do not look forward to hunting down and fixing another round of defects in all of our deployed PHP code because they have changed the language for ideological purity.<p>Code lives longer then their transition periods.<p>But, thank you for "no magic quotes". I can confidently say that they have only caused me bugs. When our testers try apostrophes in web page input they aren't looking for broken SQL, they are looking for spurious backslashes.

What do you think sets PHP apart from "every other language" which is actually a positive thing?

It seems to me that PHP has trying to be like every other language since it's beginning.

PHP is going towards where other languages have already tread long ago. I highly recommend anyone considering writing a webapp in PHP think twice about alternative languages, Python in particular.<p>Perl, Python, Ruby, and ASP.NET are all great webapp languages; but Perl is old, Ruby is heavy, and .NET is Microsoft - however PHP developers have no reason not switch to a real OOP language like Python and save themselves from a wheelbarrow-load of trouble.

magic quotes were a terrible idea, the first thing my php does is strip and magic quotes if they are enabled<p>I think namespaces will be a nice addition, and theres a few cases of nice syntactic sugar being done. the icu and xml libraries bundled / enabled looks like a good move as well

There is the PHP language, which is getting better over time, and then there is the PHP userbase, that is permanently retarded.