chore: update learn index

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Araozu 2024-08-30 20:20:36 -05:00
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@ -78,60 +78,76 @@ This page details the main design desitions of the language,
if you want to install THP go to the [installation guide](install)
## Interactive execution
## Why?
The documentation contains snippets of interactive THP code, like this:
PHP is an old language. It has been growing since 1995, adopting a
lot of features from many places like C, Perl, Java, etc. This was
done in a very inconsistent way, as detailed by Eevee in their article
[PHP: a fractal of bad design.](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)
Along the years PHP has been improving. PHP added classes, exceptions,
interfaces, traits, type hints and checks, functional features,
reflection, etc., etc. However, by building on top of the existing
language without a clear design philosophy, and by keeping backwards
compatibility, we ended up with a messy language. The article
above goes into detail about this.
In spite of this, PHP has remained widely used and loved, in a
weird way (I'd say in the same way that people love JavaScript),
and at the time of writing PHP 8.3 is available. However,
PHP is to my eyes fundamentally flawed, and cannot get up to
date without completely breaking what came before.
This is where THP comes in. I wanted a modern language
that could run in the same environment that PHP does.
And I quickly realized that building on top of PHP
in the same way that TypeScript did for JavaScript would be
detrimental. It would be better to create a completely new
language, treat PHP source code as a "low level" compilation
target, and focus entirely on the new language.
This new language would be mainly inspired by what **I** consider the best
designed languages out there: Rust as a baseline, Zig for
its null and error handling and Kotlin for its OOP features.
In a way, PHP will be adapted to, say, Rust's syntax and semantics,
instead of having Rust adapt to PHP.
In pursue of this THP **will** ditch many things about PHP,
in name of consistency. These are things that PHP devs are
used to doing, but that I consider bad practices, hacks or
workarounds. One example of this are variable variables on PHP:
`$$variable`.
Another critical point of THP is type safety. It is a goal
to approach the same level of type safety that have compiled
languages like Java/Go/Rust, and leave aside dynamic typing
as much as possible. Types cannot be turned off, you cannot
use `Any` to avoid typechecking, and so on.
Finally, there are some additions to the language that I consider
essential today: A good, unified LSP, type definitions,
accesible documentation, an opinionated code formatter
and plugins for major editors like VSCode and Neovim.
<InteractiveCode
code={`
val x = "android"
var y = 17
fun f(Int a, Int b) {
print("hello, {a} {b}")
}
f(x, y)
`}
steps={`
step {line 1}
step {
line 2
set "String x" "\\"android\\""
}
step {
line 8
set "Int y" "17"
}
step {line 4}
step {line 5}
step {
out "hello, android 17"
line 6
}
step {line 8}
step {line 0}
`}
></InteractiveCode>
Use the `Step` and `Reset` buttons to emulate the execution of a
THP program!
## Goals
- Bring static typing to PHP: Generics, type checks at compile and runtime.
- Bring static typing to PHP: Generics, type checks at compile and runtime, etc.
- Reduce implicit type conversion to a minimum.
- Remove the inconsistencies in the language.
- Organize the PHP stdlib.
- Have clear distinctions between Arrays, Tuples, Maps and Sets.
- Have a clear distinctions between Arrays, Tuples, Maps and Sets.
- Implement Union types
- Create a **consistent** language.
- Have typings for popular libraries (like TS's `.d.ts`).
- Have a simple instalation and configuration (requiring just Composer).
- Ship a fast, native binary (written in Rust) (why use PHP when we can go **_blazingly fast_**?).
- Have a simple instalation and configuration (requiring just Composer or a binary).
- Ship a **_blazingly fast_**, native binary, written in Rust.
- Support in-place compilation.
- Implement an LSP server.
- Implement a formatter.
- Implement a Language Server.
- Implement an opinionated code formatter.
## Not goals