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P++ and the future of PHP
The PHP working group has proposed to create a new dialect of PHP. What does that mean for developers, and is it a smart thing to do?
I wrote (or, to be more accurate, copied and pasted) my first lines of PHP code when I was 11 years old. After doing some basic HTML and CSS, PHP was the first ‘real’ programming language I learned.
Over the past few years Javascript has started to take up a ton of my time in my day-to-day work (building React and React Native apps and Node.js microservices). However, I still consider PHP to be the language I know the most about, including all of the little weird intricacies of the language ($needle, $haystack anyone?).
Last month, some people within the PHP internals team — the team of open source collaborators that actively develops PHP — proposed a new version of PHP called P++ (working title). P++ is supposed to resolve a growing devision between members of the internals team regarding the future of the language.
A brief history of PHP
Rasmus Lerdorf started development of an early version what would become PHP in 1994. It was a way to create HTML pages that were dynamically rendered with snippets of C code through a set of CGI scripts.
With a growing community and more and more standard functions being added, PHP soon…
