Bastian Waidelich

There are some arguments against the implementation and I agree to those. But in addition I don't agree to the concept itself, personally, because I am convinced that immutability is key when enforcing domain logic. E.g. the example above could be replaced by:

readonly class User {
		public function __construct(public string $name) {
				if (strlen($name) === 0) {
						throw new ValueError('Name must be non-empty');
				}
		}

		public function withName(string $newName): self {
				return new self($newName);
		}
}

Or, even better IMO, with value objects that validate themselves:

readonly class User {
		public function __construct(public Name $name) {}

		public function withName(Name $newName): self {
				return new self($newName);
		}
}

readonly class Name {
		public function __construct(public string $value) {
				if (strlen($value) === 0) {
						throw new ValueError('Name must be non-empty');
				}
		}
}

Granted, this is only one example and immutabilty is not a silver-bullet. But I haven't come across a usecase for property hooks that was really convincing yet

I think complaints about the syntax being messy are really about the array manipulation functions being inherently hard to format nicely.

To be clear I agree that the proposed example isn't great, nested closures are never going to win any readabillity prizes. If however we look at any non-array based manipulation I think the readabillity is objectively better:

$name = 'my_user_name'
    |> fn (string $string): string => str_replace('_', ' ', $string)
    |> strtolower(...)
    |> ucwords(...)
    |> trim(...);

Or without first class callables:

$name = 'my_user_name'
    |> fn (string $string): string => str_replace('_', ' ', $string)
    |> fn (string $string): string => strtolower($string)
    |> fn (string $string): string => ucwords($string)
    |> fn (string $string): string => trim($string);

Bonus: this also adds runtime type checks to each step. Eg strreplace returns string|array

I can't imagine anyone would think this is better:

$name = trim(
    ucwords(
        strtolower(
            str_replace('_', ' ', 'my_user_name')
        )
    )
);

..a controversial one indeed. Personally I would try to avoid this feature in my own code (just like I avoid traits and abstract classes because I feel that they are a sign of bad abstractions).

To me the fact that convinced me is the last section of the RFC:

This feature may be used to enhance existing interfaces in PHP. Countable could add function isEmpty(): bool { return $this->count() == 0; }. Iterator could add methods like map, filter, and reduce which behave similarly to array_map, array_filter, and array_reduce.

At least once a week, I throw away an array_map because it ended up looking too bloated and go with a classic foreach instead. Short Closures 2.0 without the use(...) block would've solved this problem, just 2 votes...