Hi Andi,
> On 5 Feb 2015, at 23:57, Andi Gutmans <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The folks who really want all this great strict typing should head over to Oracle.com and
> download free open-source Java? I hear it's got a lot of strict typing features in it. Only
> downside is that it'll take them 10x longer to complete their projects. OK sorry. Had to say
> that :) I realize it's not the same…
I don’t think it’s terribly funny to tell a large portion of the PHP community to go away.
> Andrea, while I don't agree with what you say I accept it. *But* exactly for the reasons
> you state (the big divide) we should also have a weak type hinting option to vote for in parallel.
> If you feel morally unable to do that then I can copy your work and just have another RFC running in
> parallel but I think that would do a disservice to the good work you've done.
No, I don’t think that’s fair. I’d be against holding a vote on strict types only for the same
reason: the community is divided. Letting one side “win" is simply unfair on everyone else.
To quote myself in the Scalar Type Hints thread, here’s a rough tally of who was in favour of what
in the v0.1 thread (I think “yourself” was Zeev in that context):
> On 15 Jan 2015, at 14:51, Andrea Faulds <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Let’s have a look. From a quick skim over the thread for v0.1:
>
> * In favour of weak types (or the RFC anyway): Adam, Stas, yourself, Jordi, Pierre,
> * Against, in favour of strict types: Maxime, Nikita, Markus, Marco, Leigh, Levi, Sven(?)
> * In favour of strict types, not against weak types as compromise: Matthew
> * Somewhat in favour: Sebastian
> * In favour of allowing both approaches: Marcio, Thomas, Marco
>
> I apologise if I am misrepresenting anyone’s position.
>
> This is unlikely to be super-representative of the PHP community. However, I’m not sure I’d
> say “overwhelmingly positive”. It can be easy to get confirmation bias when reading RFC threads.
>
> It is very clear to me that a lot of people would like strict types, and some people would like
> weak types. As to their relative numbers, I cannot say.
>
> I don’t think it’s really fair to cover only the use case of one half of the PHP community.
> The other half counts too. This is a rather divisive issue.
As is rather clear, there was no such consensus on internals. Confirmation bias can be a powerful
thing, and it’s easy to forget that the number of messages doesn’t reflect the number of
participants.
The views on other places were, from my experience, even more against weak types than internals.
Internals seems to be the most pro-weak types PHP community I’m a part of.
Because of this schism, I really think it would be completely unfair to force through weak types. I
know internals might like it (or some of internals, anyway), and I know you and Zeev certainly do,
but it’s not as clear-cut in the wider community.
This isn’t some minor issue, either: it’s a very frequently resurfacing topic, and one which is
particularly divisive. It’s not some minor syntax issue that merely holding a vote will solve.
--
Andrea Faulds
http://ajf.me/