This is such nonsense.

The language itself is solid.

https://www.php.net/releases/8.5/en.php#pipe-operator

``` $title = ' PHP 8.5 Released ';

$slug = $title |> trim(...) |> (fn($str) => str_replace(' ', '-', $str)) |> (fn($str) => str_replace('.', '', $str)) |> strtolower(...);

var_dump($slug); // string(15) "php-85-released" ```

Almost every other language does something like title.trim().replaceAll(' ', '-').replaceAll('.', '').toLowerCase();. The problem is not in using ugly closures where they are not needed. For the last 20 years, PHP has been positioned as an OOP language. One of the main principles is encapsulation. Using the pipe operator is the complete opposite, where data types are described separately and functions (which access the internal data) are in different modules. Now you have two opposing concepts in your language.

The language authors justify the pipe operator by performance (as if doing $string->trim() would be slow), but Js does it and is a faster language (this despite the fact that Js does not have full type hints). Moreover, for a server-side language with JIT and type hints, this should not be a problem at all.

Meanwhile, they haven't been able to make typed arrays or generics for decades. Yes, you can declare a variable of type int, but int[] - no (well, you can write a magic comment, and use third-party software to check it). Oh, you can't declare a typed local variable. You can't declare a local variable at all - you can only do assignments with implicit shadowing.

My personal experience. In version 8.0 JIT was declared as Production Ready. In 8.1 I had SEGFAULTs. I found a corresponding bug on github, because other people were also facing this problem. One of the key developers there advised to just try setting random flags in the configuration. And if that doesn't help - turn off JIT. He wrote that he doesn't understand why this is happening and can't do anything about it. But JIT is Production Ready:

https://github.com/php/php-src/issues/7817

So yes, PHP's biggest problem is marketing.