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Who thought PHP 5 was a big change to the scripting language, check out the results of the meeting for PHP 6 development:

http://www.php.net/~derick/meeting-notes.html

Changes include removal of register_globals, register_long_arrays and safe_mode, E_STRICT on by default, case-sensitive identifiers, and a lot of changes to OO.

It is very likely that namespaces will be implemented. The mess that the 5.1.0 release has created prompted calls for namespaces in PHP 5.2.

It's actually a good sign and direction if ya ask me but man is it a nightmare for programmers to get up to speed with just when they get used to a set amount or parameters.

These aren't so bad. We've been told for ages that register_globals is bad right? For long arrays, most documentation encourages $_GET/$_POST now too.

Oh, for strict variable typing, how I long for thee.

Imo, register globals should have been removed since PHP 5.

medwards wrote

Oh, for strict variable typing, how I long for thee.

I don't, loose types make the learning curve much less steep and PHP easier to use IMO. I don't see any really good reason to lose that other than to make purists feel that warm fuzzy feeling.

All these big changes, yet they still refuse to adhere to their own function naming standards!

Michael_C wrote

I don't, loose types make the learning curve much less steep and PHP easier to use IMO. I don't see any really good reason to lose that other than to make purists feel that warm fuzzy feeling.

I find not being confident in what kind of data I'm working with, or not knowing how typecasting may work in a specific situation very uncomfortable. Often I'll diddle around in a function call making sure the caller isn't a moron before I just get the work done.

That being said, PHP5 is supposed to have "Type Hinting" (which is just a nice way of saying strict typing). Thus you folks can have flexibility, and I can have confidence in input. In fact, for myself at least, this may lead to interesting hybrid approaches: in most cases go with strict typing, but even GoF's Design Patterns has some interesting approaches with loose typing that I'd be interested in exploring.