The PHP Podcast 2026.08.06

🎙️ PHP Podcast – August 6, 2026

Hosts: Joe Ferguson, Sara Golemon & Holly Schilling

A sick kitten steals the show, Sara loses a fight with her smart lights, PHP 8.6 beta is almost here, and the crew argues about roadmaps, deprecations, and why you shouldn’t be a meat proxy.

🐱 Cats, Ice Cream, and Bobbleheads
The episode opened with the usual chaos: Holly’s kitten Rosie made a full appearance, having spent the week battling a chest infection that turned into a sinus and ear infection and threw off her balance. Three vet visits later, Rosie was recovering but very cuddly — and apparently convinced Holly’s headset mic was a cat toy. Sara, catless but armed with ice cream, argued that ice cream beats cats because there’s no poop to clean up.

The conversation spun into merchandise ideas after Eric dropped a photo of a bobblehead in the Discord. The crew riffed on 3D-printing speaker action figures and bobbleheads for the conference, with Holly getting Eric on record that it “would not be expensive” — a statement immediately screenshotted for posterity. Sara and Holly quickly reminded everyone that multicolor prints are their own painful challenge, and someone with Warhammer 40k painting patience would be required.

🐘 PHP 8.6 Beta on the Horizon
With 8.6 beta 1 landing a week out, the hosts walked through the highlights from the Stitcher.io “what’s new” write-up. Sara was excited about partial function application finally arriving, though Holly isn’t thrilled with the `…` syntax — but couldn’t propose a better one either. They dug into an earlier, unshipped design that used `$1`/`$2` positional placeholders (similar to Swift), and Joe kept circling back to Python-style named arguments before admitting he wasn’t entirely sure he was describing the right feature.

They also covered read-only property defaults (a natural follow-on to 8.4’s property hooks on interfaces), the new polling API that’s largely future-facing for threading and concurrency work, the new `clamp()` function, and a long-overdue `Duration` class. Holly repeatedly questioned why something like `clamp()` needs to be in the language at all, with Sara conceding the point but noting PHP is a “kitchen sink language” and that ship has sailed. For `Duration`, Sara made the case that it genuinely belongs in core because it’s tied to the timezone knowledge baked into the underlying date/time library.

🗑️ Deprecations and the Two Populations of PHP
Joe pulled up numbers comparing deprecation RFCs across recent versions — roughly 28 proposals for 8.6, 46 for 8.5, 26 for 8.4, just six for 8.3, and none actually voted on for 8.2 (which Sara guessed lined up with Nikita stepping back to work on LLVM, back when deprecations were called “Nikita’s hit list”). Many of the 8.6 deprecations, organized by Gina P. Banyard, aim to free up words to become reserved keywords in future versions.

The `list()` deprecation came up as a sore spot: Holly would love to see it gone and never uses it in new code, while Joe worries the blast radius across legacy codebases is enormous. That led Sara to articulate the core tension: there are two very different populations of PHP users — the ones aggressively upgrading and adopting new features (the podcast’s audience), and the ones who just want to run their WordPress site without the language shifting under them. Both groups matter, and the language has to push forward without needlessly breaking the second group.

🗺️ The Roadmap Debate
Building on deprecations, the crew wished aloud that PHP had something resembling a roadmap — not set-in-stone dates, but broad aims like “a feature like X might justify bumping to 9.” Joe suggested borrowing from game dev studios, who publish colorful roadmaps with rough years instead of hard dates and don’t crucify anyone when things slip. Holly noted that even the AI she was workshopping a blog post with warned that PHP internals doesn’t handle the word “roadmap” well and to assume any such proposal will fail.

Sara, invoking her “lawyer’s advice” not to mention it was a recent meeting topic, pointed out the practical wrinkle: the foundation’s paid developers are largely self-directed, and no one is telling them what donors want them to build. Still, everyone agreed a shared set of goals would be valuable. Holly and Sara also gave a shout-out to the unsung, unsexy work — documentation, triage, bug fixing — that keeps the lights on, and to the foundation’s first quarterly progress report for showing what contractors are actually doing.

🐎 Longhorn PHP and Travel Logistics
Holly announced her Longhorn PHP talk, “That’s Your Website, Not Your Mobile App,” slotted at 2:30 in Austin on October 15–16. The talk is a venting session about her pet peeve: teams wrapping a Laravel/React/whatever website in a native shell and shipping it as an app without bridging the model differences — regardless of tech stack. She noted it’s her first time at Longhorn, though she recently spoke at a Chicago mobile developers meetup exactly one week shy of ten years after her last appearance there.

The travel talk sprawled into a would-be road-trip convoy (picking up Joe in Memphis, A. Woods from New York, and even attempting to ferry Sara’s car across the ocean), plus a tangent on how absurdly expensive Amtrak is compared to flying — versus Sara’s 20-euro monthly rail pass in Portugal that covers the entire length of the country.

🤖 Don’t Be a Meat Proxy
The show closed on Niklas Gruhn’s blog post “Don’t Be a Meat Proxy,” which argues against copy-pasting raw AI output at other humans. Joe described his own workflow: read the AI feedback, condense and distill it, rewrite it, and clearly label anything unvetted (robot emoji included) so teammates know he hasn’t verified it yet. Sara pushed the point harder — if you’re just regurgitating what Claude or Gemini said, the person asking could have done that themselves, so you’re not adding value.

Holly complicated it with real-world nuance: some coworkers ask questions they could’ve answered themselves, then call you rude when you give a condensed answer and keep poking at its edges. The crew acknowledged a whole gradient exists — from “let me Google that for you” territory to genuine “what’s the best way to approach X” conversations that aren’t fact lookups. Sara, self-professed AI hater, admitted the balance has shifted toward “just search it” because AIs are genuinely good at search — with plenty of deep irony noted about machines being good at reading and grokking information humans don’t want to. Bonus: Holly praised naming xAI’s bot “Grok” as genuinely clever.

Links from the show:

Hosts:

Streams:

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📬 Connect & Hire

Looking to hire PHP developers? Email support@phparch.com – Joe and the team are available for consulting, infrastructure work, Ansible playbooks, and code review.

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