PHP is Evolving – Deprecations and Revolutions

We did well. The PHP community did well; we were lucky. Indeed, PHP has been evolving very strongly for a few years now. But this strong evolution hasn’t always been there. This was mainly due to problems during the development of PHP 6, which was why this version was never released. This explains why so many projects were (and still are) stuck at PHP 5.

PHP 7 has wiped the slate clean and brought a real revival to the language. Moreover, it is a real breath of fresh air that has boosted the language toward new horizons.

PHP went from being an almost dead language to a language catching up and projecting itself in the future. In this last chapter, dedicated to the clean-code theory, we will focus on the following points:

• How PHP is different from its past versions
• How these changes will help you become a more rigorous and better developer, and not only in PHP
• What the major new features of PHP are in...

Old versus new PHP

PHP has likely helped you become a much more rigorous developer over the years. If during its first decades of existence, PHP allowed you to write code the way you wanted to and without restricting you from doing so, with the (very) few advantages that this brings, in hindsight, it was mostly the opportunity to have as many ways to write code as there are developers (which rarely lead to exceptional results) that made it popular. As we now know, that can be a source of endless and infernal bugs to debug. Fortunately, the evolution of the language in the last few years has fixed a lot of these bugs, to the benefit of our applications.

Strict typing

First, let’s look at one of the most important things you should be using in the newest versions of PHP from version 7.4 – the strict typing of properties.

There was a time you were allowed to pass any data to any variable and cast variables as much as you wish, without a real and native way to prevent...

The version 8 revolution

As we have seen, PHP has experienced exceptional momentum in its evolution for the last few years. While we thought that version 7 was a real rebirth of the language, version 8 proved that it was only the beginning. Here are the main new features that will help you write clear and concise code, and that will help you to push even further the principles of clean code that we have seen throughout these chapters.

Match syntax

The match syntax is the condensed version of the classic switch/case. It should not be used everywhere because it can quickly become unreadable. However, if you choose the places where you use it sparingly, your code can become much clearer in an instant. Here is an example of the match syntax:

$foo = match($var) {
    ‹value 1› => Bar::myMethod1(),
    ‹value 2› => Bar::myMethod2(),
};

It works the same way as switch. However, note the difference in the...

Summary

It cannot be repeated enough: PHP is evolving in the most beautiful way and is catching up with its competitors in the web world. The language listens to the community and the developers by offering them the tools they need to answer modern problems in the most viable way possible.

We have come a long way from a language that allowed everything and was very (too) lax for the challenges of today’s web applications. Despite the explosion of frontend frameworks and technologies aimed at replacing server languages with languages intended for the frontend (such as Node.js with JavaScript), PHP has nothing to be ashamed of. Its impressive performance, its speed of evolution, and the reputation it has built over the years show that it still has a bright future ahead of it.

Although clean code is, as we have seen, a state of mind and, in a way, a philosophy, solutions native to the language are arriving in spades to help us apply them as well as possible. Even better,...