I'm glad the community around modern PHP is thriving, but filler articles like these are getting on my nerves. Reiterating a bunch of content that has already been covered extensively on the web in the past months (and in 10+ previous posts on your own blog), slapping a misleading title on it and filling it up with call-to-action's for your own personal video/newsletter/courses isn't good content. The author had some really good articles in the past, but this reads like fluff just to fill up his blog. Quality over quantity.
I’m the author, and I think you’re partially right.
This article wasn’t done (and I’m still going to finish it, a “looking forward” section is missing)
I published it to get some feedback from the occasional reader, which I do more often. You can see I haven’t tweeted or posted it anywhere, I wanted to wait a couple of days still; so it’s a little unfortunate it got picked up here so soon. Of course I’m happy with the positive reception overall, but I agree that it’s not done yet.
On the part of self promotion within my own content: that’s just the way I’ve been doing it for years. I don’t feel guilty about mentioning other things I’ve made that I’m proud of and what I believe are high value as well. So on that part I don’t agree.
I do appreciate the overall feedback though, thanks for taking the time to share it
You're not wrong, but Brent's articles are just about the cream de la cream for PHP. I'm glad to see him on the HN front page. I've been coding in PHP since 1999, so I've seen the language evolve from not-Perl to what we have today. For maybe two or three years now I've relied on to Brent to bring me up to the newest state of the art without having to parse changelogs and release notes (which I usually get to around March or April, a few months after the yearly December release).
For those of us in the PHP industry, I feel that the most concise way to stay up to date is with Brent's commentary and the Jetbrains PhpStorm blog.
He wrote some decent articles before, and he might write some good ones in the future, but this right here, this ain't it.
Unlike other "x in 2022" articles (for example https://www.ncameron.org/blog/rust-in-2022-2/), this one doesn't actually give any insight into the future of the language. Not only that, but there is no original content in it. He's simply repeating what he's been writing about for the past year. Maybe he should've called it PHP in 2021? Oh wait, he already did that (https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2021) and it's eerily similar to this article. If there is nothing new to write about, why write?
I'm glad you bring up the PHP Annotated Monthly blog, it's a great resource and definitely one of the blogs to follow to keep up to date with PHP.
