I for one think this is awesome - particularly for those of us who sling php for a living by day and read programming romance novels by night. My contribution in a similar vein can be found here: <a href="http://commonphp.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://commonphp.blogspot.com/</a>
Well, it's been written somewhere that the longer you work on anything the bigger the chance that you'll have a bug-ridden implementation of lisp in there somewhere...
To be honest, I'm not quite sure what this article is trying to point out; lambda functions (and functional-style programming) have been a part of the PHP language for a very long time -- since PHP4 to be exact. It may not be as "sexy" to look at as Lisp et al, but it's certainly been doable.<p><pre><code> $fn = create_function( "$a", "return $a * 2" );
$list = array( 1, 2, 3, 4 );
$double = array_map( $fn, $list ); // array( 2, 4, 6, 8 )
</code></pre>
or<p><pre><code> function my_filter( $a ) { return $a > 10 ? true : false; }
$list = array( 5, 10, 15, 20 );
$less = array_filter( $list, "my_filter" ); // array( 15, 20 )</code></pre>
1) It still has all those ugly sigils.<p>2) There is still a large body of "PHP coders" that don't code this way, don't expect others to code this way, and probably won't understand code written thus. The community <i>is</i> the language.
PHP, welcome to the early 80s. Who knows, soon you might have real datatypes!<p>Does the Zend engine do TCO? When I search, Google thinks I mean "Total Cost of Ownership". All I can find is <a href="http://devzone.zend.com/article/1235" rel="nofollow">http://devzone.zend.com/article/1235</a>.
I remember fiddling around with PHPs recursion and having it get very bad very quickly.<p>Why use lambdas and recursion with PHP when there's tons of languages that do it better?