New language on top of PHP?

Question

I\'m a PHP developer. I like PHP! It is a really good language if you know how to use it, but I know it allows very bad design sometimes.

It reminds me of JavaScript whi

Answer 1

Heh, great idea. My thoughts, some contradictory...

There are precedents for civilizing bad languages by putting syntax preprocessors in front of them.

• In the early days of Unix, Fortran was popular and about the only portable language because most machines had no C compiler. But the vanilla Fortran of the day didn't even have block structured if-then-else, just a goofy single-statement if or an if-goto. So, the Ratfor language was implemented as a preprocessor for Fortran-66.
• I believe there were (are?) Cobol preprocessors that presumably dealt with the verbosity and limitations of early Cobol dialects.
• To this day Unix-derived systems ship with a macro processor called m4.
• Several CSS preprocessors are available today, most notably Sass and LESS.

But...

• Just let it die, and the sooner the better
• The problem isn't really in the syntax.
• I don't see much of a JavaScript-PHP parallel. JavaScript is a great language. It's kind of the opposite of PHP.
• I'm not sure why you say that PHP is a great language. It's one of the worst. Every decent feature is a patch or repatch in a recent version.
• As you noted, there is a fixed-up version of PHP already: it's called Ruby and, as a language, it's near-perfect. There is another fixed-up version called Python. The world would be better off in the long run if we support the better systems.