Based on the examples given in the blog post, this appears to be a massive step backwards for PHP. The language has been making an effort to clean itself up for years. The author claims that the temporary variable solution "feels icky". If we ultimately care about readability and performance, temporary variables seem ideal even with this change in the language. Modern compilers look for things like temporary variables when performing optimizations. PHP's compiler probably already does this, and if it doesn't, adding support for that would make more sense than adding some new syntax.

I feel like if you treat temporary variables as documentation they feel less icky. All these examples with the pipeline operator cause way more mental overhead than reading temporary variable names.

I'm not complaining, and I respect the PHP team for continuing to try to improve the language, but I think that we might have passed the point where new additions to the language actually make it worse.

Kind of a clunky and verbose syntax at the moment. I wonder what languages get pipe syntax right?

Obligatory: Raku supports pipe in both directions, passing input as the last parameter instead of requiring the function to take only one parameter. It also has a shorthand:

my @array = <7 8 9 0 1 2 4 3 5 6 7 8 9>; my @final-array = @array.unique.sort.reverse; say @final-array;

Great news! PHP is going to humiliate all its haters.