I might be a minority, but i truly enjoy PHPs syntax a lot. No other language i use gives me the same joy.
Modern PHP is great, the past & some fundamental decisions are automatic tech debt that i can live with. It'd be great if PHP 8.3 gets forked with no backward compatibility, removing all the old PHP as a template engine designed functions that nobody needs & release under a new name. I just can't find the same type of joy in writing code as i do when writing PHP. But some things are truly annoying. Just not enough for me to switch or start the fork myself.
On a few occasions I've done a few weeks of refactoring the php source toward creating just such a fork, but decided it was just going to be too much work over time for too little benefit for too few people. And that's true of pretty much all "legacy-free" forks: it's fun to rip out all the legacy crap, but you're left with an incompatible language in the end, at which point you're probably better off starting with a different language entirely.
Anything of your refactorings public to check out?
> but you're left with an incompatible language in the end, at which point you're probably better off starting with a different language entirely.
Yes, but which one?
No matter which one i try, in the end, i am always close to rewriting it with php.
Eg as many good things go has, i don't enjoy the syntax as much as phps. I could live with it, given the advantages. But i can't get over it, that most of my code seems to be error checking. Sure, that's probably a good thing for serious work. But that's just not where the joy in programming lies for me. Most cases phps try-catch feels much, much more elegant / fun to write (not comparing the efficiency of the outcome).
I do love the fact i end up with a single executable. And php without framework requires much more overhead, which is also annoying. And i am done with php frameworks.
I'm afraid I burned it down to the ground, but the last attempt never got me much past reorganizing the headers and ripping out ifdefs for all non-posix systems (bye bye windows support). These days I'm interested in more green-field languages like unison, though I'm still trying to think of something to write in it (or any inspiring language, really).
Modern PHP is great, the past & some fundamental decisions are automatic tech debt that i can live with. It'd be great if PHP 8.3 gets forked with no backward compatibility, removing all the old PHP as a template engine designed functions that nobody needs & release under a new name. I just can't find the same type of joy in writing code as i do when writing PHP. But some things are truly annoying. Just not enough for me to switch or start the fork myself.