They added new sane features, deprecated old stuff with more to come, improved performance by over 100% on many workloads while maintaining backwards compatibility, implemented a proper AST with a JIT to follow.
I'm curious what your idea of improving is frankly.
Have you heard the expression, "A chain is only as strong as the weakest link?". So adding strong links after a weak link does not "improve" the strength of the chain.
And that is assuming that these new features added are actually sane. From what I have seen, it is not the case. see here [1]
So you cannot improve php with out making it "not php". And I don't think even if the same people started who are working in the language started from scratch, today, it will be much better than Php. Because they are simply not competent (refer [1]), because if you are competent, and has the vision to see the flaws of the language and the community, you won't go anywhere near it. So I think there is zero chance of Php becoming "sane", let alone nice...
Even a language that is regarded as well designed has unexpected behaviour, it's not necessarily wrong it's just not what the user expects.
They fixed it in 3 but does it's existence in 2 make Python a bad language?
PHP historically did a lot of stuff that a user wouldn't expect but they have started to clean that up, it won't happen overnight but the trend is there, strong and growing.
No such thing as a perfect programming language since everyone has a different definition of perfect.
I am not sure why you think It is unexpected behavior. And even if it is, it is not even in the same league as the quirks of Php. It would be if 3/2 outputs 1 but 7/2 outputs 3.5, both in Python 2. Then that would be unexpected behavior in the same league as that of Php's.
> it won't happen overnight but the trend is there, strong and growing.
It is just appearance. Just movement, not progress. I just provided you with an example on how new features added follows the same incompetent design, consistant with Php's track record.
>No such thing as a perfect programming language since everyone has a different definition of perfect.
Yea, there is no perfect one, But there is something that is too bad that should not be used. Php is that. It is not going to change.
This is a myth. It is adding new features. That does not mean it is improving.