Rasmus Lerdorf Talks PHP 5.6, 6.0 and Beyond (blog.wepay.com)

Two snippets I found significant and good news:

Q: What about backward compatibility? I’m worried that PHP might go down the path that Python went down with Python 3 not compatible with Python 2.

  Rasmus: We’re not planning a Python type of break. 
  Chances are that anything that breaks in PHP 6 will be 
  features that resulted in pretty hard warnings in PHP 5
  [...] No drastic changes are planned in PHP 6.

Q: What’s your take on the static code analysis?

  Rasmus: [...] The community is hoping to get Facebook to 
  release their static analysis system as a standalone
  tool. [...]

Btw. the linked slides provide a good overview of new features.

So what.

Incidentally, Rasmus was in fact the most famous programmer from Greenland I met on that month when I met him

I hope that 6.0 does clear out some of the interchangeability between stack and needle, but that could be a huge barrier for upgrading.

A few other things on my wish list would be python-like arrays/strings, with slicing via [].slice(). Every time I do something of moderate complexity it ends up looking huge.

For example, converting snAke_case to snakeCase looks like this:

  lcfirst(implode(array_map('ucfirst', explode('_', $string))))

Where I would like:

  $string.explode('_').map('uc_first').implode().lcfirst()

I sat through his talk and I definitely recommend taking a look at the slides. The new language features are exciting (like argument unpacking in function signatures [1] and constant scalar expressions [2]). What was really useful was learning how to deploy atomically without killing existing requests[3].

[1] - http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56unpack [2] - http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/php56constscalar [3] - http://talks.php.net/wepay14#/7