Good bye PHP. You have been a good bread and butter language for me. Sorry to say the dumbosity of the design decisions being made about you are too much to live with. It’s time I moved on to bigger and better things with a better sense of direction.

Reading the IRC chat log that lead to the “backslash as namespace separator” decision just affirms my impression that the PHP language is in the hands of neurotic, crack-smoking monkeys. Well except for a few people like Dmitry. Apparently there are two problems with “::” that prove too difficult for them to solve:

1. There are some modifications needed for “::” to work properly but these modifications will break existing code. I would say, what the hell! Break existing code! PHP6 will break existing code anyway. But no, they also want namespaces in PHP5 so there!

2. The engine can’t detect ambiguity without calling autoload. It introduces the so-called “autoload bomb”. Apparently, calling autoload once for each namespace as Dmitry suggested is “impracticable[sic] because it relies on the programmer to know when ambiguity arises”. Huh?!? Forgive me but isn’t it the job of the compiler/interpreter to detect such an ambiguity and tell the programmer???

So instead of fixing the fundamental problems with the engine, they want to use the band-aid solution of adding a different syntax for namespaces. Oh wait, maybe it’s because the engine is so horribly designed that it’s impossible to write in sensible changes without having the whole thing fall apart completely?

I have been fighting so hard to keep this from swaying me away from PHP. I have lived through and worked around the inconsistencies and quirks of the language, but this “backslash as namespace separator” crap is the last straw. It sucks that I have to maintain a lot of PHP code but from this point onwards, I will no longer use PHP for new projects.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 27th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Code and Consequences, PHP, You are doing it WRONG!!!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.