Back when I started using PHP properly in the early 5.0 days, it felt like the language was pretty basic. Other languages were making leaps and bounds every year, and as time went on, PHP seemed to have stagnated. The language wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as good as it could’ve been.

That all changed this decade. PHP has come an awful long way in the last few years and is once again proving that it’s got what it takes to be a programming language people should take seriously, even outside the web. I’m hugely happy with the direction PHP has taken and the amazing work of the core contributors and the entire ecosystem.

That said, there are a handful of things I would love to see PHP implement at some point in the future. These are a few things that I would’ve liked to be able to use every now and again when the circumstances for them come up.

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PHP is a loosely typed language. It doesn’t care what types you throw around. Unless you want it to care.

The language has come a long way in the last several years to bring in a robust type system, allowing developers to enforce types in both function parameters and what a function’s return value is.

For everything else, there’s docblocks, ugly sanitisation and assertion code, and crossing your fingers to hope your function’s API holds up in practice.

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Note: Since writing this post, I came across the pecl-php-operator extension on GitHub that does exactly what I described in this post, it’s awesome!

php/pecl-php-operator

Operator overloading for Objects. Contribute to php/pecl-php-operator development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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