There has been a lot of talk about typing in PHP lately. There are a couple of popular proposals for how to clean up PHP’s APIs to be simpler. Most of them involve changing PHP’s type system at a very fundamental level. So I thought it would be a good idea to talk about that. What goes into a type?
I read a rather interesting post yesterday called PHP: a fractal of bad design. It’s been getting a lot of traffic among the PHP community lately because it’s rather inflammatory. But to be honest, it does make a lot of really good points. It also makes a lot of mistakes and misses a bigger picture.
Recently there has been a rather heated and intense discussion on whether the PSR-0 autoloader “standard” should be included as part of the PHP core (in ext/spl to be exact). I’ve tried to stay out of the discussion and have successfully done so. Until today. I feel that there’s something that’s been missing to the discussion. So rather then posting this to the internals list, I feel it’s better served by a blog post on the subject. So here’s my take on it.
TL;DR:
I don’t think it should be included in the core.
Last night I was discussing the SPL Iterators with @go_oh in the PHP StackOverflow chat room when I came across something very interesting. We were talking about why some of the SPL Iterators accept only an Iterator as the constructor argument (Such as LimitIterator), and others accept either an Iterator or an IteratorAggregate as the argument (Such as IteratorIterator). Feeling that this would be a useful feature to add (having all of them accept an IteratorAggregate), I opened up the PHP source and started looking at how hard of a change this would be. What I found was… Interesting…