PHP is improving, slowly, but it is still way better than the PHP 5.x days. If your last memory of PHP is from 5.x, it's a very different language now - even if it still has oddities, quirks, inconsistencies, and footguns, but PHP is still not the king of footguns - C++ is.

I would ask though that if any PHP developers are reading this, I would love a feature called `modern_syntax` or similar which represents a major break in backwards compatibility in exchange for modern language conventions (i.e. no `$` prefix on variables, no `;` ending lines, perhaps some renamed core functions for consistency - we can have a debate about this). Kind of like how we have `strict_types`. Or, perhaps it could be invokable on a per-file basis, by using `

That would help, I would argue, with killing many of the PHP-specific criticisms while allowing some degree of backwards-compatibility.

I don't see why appeasing critics should be the goal of PHP.

Removing $ and ; signs doesn't help me at all. I actually like the "$" sign. Maybe little bit less ;, but I don't really notice it.

But I would certainly notice the mess of splitting language syntax into two separate branches.

Breaking changes in language are not fun to address and take away the time from building features.

I would be a lot more happy with generics. Or scalar objects, something like:

$string = "abc";

var_dump($string->length()); // int(3)

var_dump($string->startsWith("a")); // bool(true)

https://github.com/nikic/scalar_objects

That would make PHP standard library a lot easier and fun to use.