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?

ElePHPant, the PHP mascot. Image by Ulf Wendel.

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.