After working with PHP for about 13 years, and heavily with JS for about 4, there are a couple things I think PHP would do well to borrow from JS:

1) shorthand notation for Arrays and Objects. I believe this may have been discussed and shot down on Internals (so I hear – I don't like to see how the sausage is made), but I really, really find that the literal notation for arrays and objects in JS is a big productivity win.

For example:

$arr = [1,2,3,4]; $assoc = [foo=>'bar', baz=>'boo']; $stdobj = {foo->'bar', baz->'boo'};

Is (IMHO) just much easier to write and cleaner than

$arr = array(1,2,3,4); // not too bad $assoc = array("foo"=>'bar', baz=>'boo'); // not too bad either $stdobj = new stdClass; // this gets pretty rough $stdobj->foo = 'bar'; $stdobj->baz = 'boo';

I've heard that some concern about potential confusion was raised, but really, is this any more confusing than, say, heredoc notation? At very least, making a stdClass object in PHP is verbose enough to discourage the practice, I think.

2) Being able to redefine previously-defined functions and methods would be really useful. It would particular simplify situations extending a class and instantiating the new class is either overly complex or impractical. I do think we should avoid redefinition of core/non-userspace functions and methods, though.

In addition to those two, I think PHP must transparently support unicode. This is becoming more and more of a problem for developers, and the solutions currently offered in PHP are confusing and frequently non-performant. Making all standard string functionality unicode-friendly out of the box would be a massive win for PHP programmers.

Thanks for asking!