I’ve heard plenty of positive buzz about PHP 6 in the last few weeks. Yes, it’s coming out. Yes, it brings quite a few improvements, including better Unicode support, better security, and more help for larger projects through namespaces. However, I hope that it won’t be the last PHP release, since there are so many other things that need fixing.
Here is a good overview, as compared to the best programming language ever – Perl. But this probably reminds you of a famous Euro-English joke, no? But I do miss sigils and proper hashes. I’d love to see better memory management when programming objects. I’d love to see improved database interfaces with prepared statements and database abstraction layer. I would really welcome a cleanup in function names and return values. I … I … I … I hope that PHP 6 is not the end of the road, and that PHP 7, PHP 8, and PHP 9 will follow.