Unleashing PHP 8.5: The Power of the Pipe Operator

Host

Welcome back to TechTalk! I'm your host, Jamie, and today we have something exciting for all you PHP developers out there. PHP 8.5 is set to introduce a new feature that many have been eagerly anticipating—the pipe operator. To help us understand what this means for PHP, we have Larry Garfield with us, a prominent contributor to the PHP community. Larry, welcome!

Expert

Thanks for having me, Jamie! I'm excited to talk about the pipe operator and its potential impact on the way we write PHP.

Host

Great! So, to start off, can you explain what the pipe operator actually is and how it works?

Expert

Absolutely! The pipe operator, represented by |>, allows you to take the value on its left side and pass it as an argument to a function on its right side. For instance, if you have a string, 'Hello World,' you could use the pipe operator to pass it directly to the strlen function to get its length. It simplifies the syntax and makes the code more readable.

Host

That does sound straightforward! But I imagine it becomes even more powerful when you start chaining operations together?

Expert

Exactly! When you chain multiple operations using the pipe operator, you create what's called a pipeline. For example, if you have an array of Widgets, you can use a pipeline to extract their tags, merge them into a single array, remove duplicates, and reindex the array—all in a clean, readable way. Without pipes, you'd end up with nested function calls that can be pretty hard to read.

Host

So, it’s like keeping your code clean and tidy! Can you give us a quick example of how that looks in practice?

Expert

Sure! Here’s a snippet of code: you define an array of Widgets, then you can pipe the array into a series of functions. You would do something like this: take the array, pipe it to array_column to get the tags, then pipe that result to array_merge, followed by array_unique, and finally array_values. The end result is a neat array of unique tags.

Host

That sounds really efficient! Now, I’ve heard that this pipe operator isn’t entirely new to programming. Can you tell us where it came from?

Expert

Great question! The pipe operator has roots in many functional programming languages like F# and OCaml. The concept is similar to shell piping in Unix/Linux, where the output of one command becomes the input of another. PHP’s journey towards adopting it started with Hack, Facebook's PHP fork, which introduced its own type of pipe operator.

Host

Interesting! So, it’s been in the works for a while. What made it finally happen in PHP 8.5?

Expert

It took a lot of collaboration and feedback from the community. Initially, there were proposals that didn’t gain traction, but in recent years, as more developers recognized the value of functional programming concepts, a renewed interest sparked. My work on functional programming in PHP also played a role in pushing this feature forward.

Host

It sounds like this is going to significantly improve how developers write PHP code! Thanks for breaking it down for us, Larry.

Expert

My pleasure, Jamie! I hope more developers explore the possibilities the pipe operator brings.

Host

Absolutely! And for our listeners, make sure to stay tuned for more updates on PHP 8.5. Thanks for joining us today!