It might be difficult to believe, but 10 years ago PHP 5.4 was brand new. It was the very first PHP version I used. It had features like short arrays and traits; and from what I understand, it's the release that many veteran PHP developers consider a turning point its development.

I marvel at how much the language has changed in a decade; I'm equally impressed with how the ecosystem has evolved; how the web in general has grown as well. Seeing all of that happen in merely 10 years makes me wonder: where will we be 10 years from now?

Will PHP still be a thing — I think there's little doubt about that — but in what form will it be used? 10 years from now, will I be sending a newsletter about PHP 10? Or maybe my long-term (but unfeasible) dream of a superset for PHP will be realised? What will the Foundation achieve in the next decade? What will Laravel, Symfony and WordPress look like?

10 years is a really long time in software development, so it's only guessing of course.

Now that we're nearing the end of the year, I'm feeling reminiscent of the journey I've been on these past years and I can't help but sentimentally wonder about these future questions. (It might also have something to do with the birth of our third baby coming closer, who knows?)

I know I won't come up with any definitive answers about PHP's future, but I am looking forward to discovering it over time. I mostly hope that PHP and its community still have a long and prosperous way to go.

I wanted to send out this newsletter because I'm genuinely curious: where do you think PHP and its community will be in 10 years? Or 5, if 10 is too far away? You can always hit reply and share your thoughts 🙂 Speaking of, thanks to everyone who replied to the previous mail as well — I didn't have time to answer all of you, but I do read every reply, and really appreciate your input!

My thoughts? I hope for a superset of PHP, but I don't think that will ever happen. I am curious about the community's mindset towards static analysis, and whether there'll be room for PHP to evolve to a language with a built-in, opt-in static analyser that adds functionality to the language itself (runtime-ignored generics come to mind).

On top of that, I hope that the language will keep growing in a way that actually matters for developers. That PHP may evolve in a way that positively impacts the day-by-day developer lives of literally millions of people. I guess the main difficulty here is that those millions of people don't all have the same wishes, and don't use PHP in the same way 😅 — which is the reason I'm asking you about it: I want to better understand the PHP community, and not just assume my dreams for PHP are what everyone else wants.

I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts 🙂

In closing, I wanted to share a couple of interesting links as well, time for another…

Roundup

• Laravel 10 will have native types in most places — I'm in the "strict and static typing camp", so this is definitely great news to me. I'm sure tools like Laravel Shift will make the transition easy enough :)
• What's new in PHP 8.2 — video edition — If you want to see PHP 8.2 in action: the first video of our PHP Annotated channel has been published. I'm really happy with how the news has been received!
• 24 days in December is coming back — The yearly PHP advent tradition with a month full of blog posts written by the PHP community is coming back! I'm participating this year, maybe you can too? You don't need to be a professional writer, if you've got an interesting story to tell then this might be a good opportunity!

That's it for this week's edition, until next time!

Brent