A language that uses archaic syntax with dollar vars, semicolons, is pretty verbose itself may die before it evolves into something sensible. Not that I believe PHP will die any time soon, but just replying to your "slow is good".
There is a real productivity gain when you remove all things that cause a mental tax on reading. After Swift I don't want to look back at the C-like syntax languages any more (just that occasionally I have to).
> A language that uses archaic syntax with dollar vars, semicolons, is pretty verbose itself may die
Careful there :-) Modern javascript has semicolons and is introducing pretty horrendous syntax for private variables (an octothorpe) and possibly for the pipe operator (percent sign, was it?) and for tuples and records, yet is showing no signs of dying.
Sometimes the extra options can produce unexpected problems. For example, in JavaScript, this would return nothing and may result in an unreachable code warning:
function go() {
return
5 + 3;
}
console.log(go())
Since semicolons are optional, it's treating "return" as its own statement and "5 + 3" as a separate one.
There are no hidden gotchas like this in PHP though since semicolons are always used: