PHP has changed for the better in so many ways in the time between PHP5 and PHP8, making it far easier to write good code, but oh wow do I wish their basic string and array manipulation functions had some consistency. I'm extremely tempted to port LINQ to PHP just so I don't have to deal with completely random* naming & parameter ordering.
(*not actually random; it stems from an old design quirk to do with how standard functions were hashed and indexed internally. it's just annoying)
my only real wishlist items for implementing something like LINQ would be:
typed arrays (so T[] rather than just array)
generic inferencing, so if you say function foo(<T> $param) : <T> the type inferencer can identify that whatever type is passed into $param will also be the return type. also with support for derivatives, e.g. <T>[] and ?<T>.
this is the kind of thing I'm talking about, inspired by how ToDictionary works in .NET
I have no idea if I'll turn this into a whole library (right now it's only got two functions!) but it's super useful compared to doing this kind of thing manually every time, and having to think about how array_reduce / array_map work and how to pass external variables into the callback.
@Rairii more completely, the input type is iterable, so it'll work with pretty much anything you throw at it. the output type is always array (more specifically T[] in the phpdoc), unless you use the *Lazy variants in which case it's Generator<mixed,T>
I also made ContainsAtLeast and ContainsNoMoreThan, which are early-out optimised queries for thresholding against predicates, since it's something .NET doesn't have but I wish it did.
one cool thing about this being a port in spirit rather than a 1:1 mapping is that I can extend functionality in a way that makes certain tasks easier.
for example, in C# Linq all predicates and selectors pretty much just get the element value and that's it, whereas I'm providing the numeric index in the sequence, the key, and the value, so you can work with all that info together.
in the case of GroupBy, I'm also giving the element value selector (projection) access to the group key.
this means you end up being able to integrate the group key into the value projection if you want, which is very useful when the group key selector function is dynamically selected at runtime.
@gsuberland oh the fun I had with IEnumerable<T> in the day. Extension methods, I still miss 'em.
Though I did discover a generation of devs who couldn’t read basic map-filter pipelines, refused to learn, and thus wrote hundred-line functions hand-building intermediate collections five lines at a time.
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