PHP 5.4: The New Bits

This was a good overview of traits and the other new features of PHP 5.4.

Good overview. Code slides could have used some contrast.

I liked the code examples, But some more concrete examples of why these features will be useful would be nice. Most of the features seemed rife for abuse, it would be nice to hear some practical uses.

Good talk. I appreciated hearing the options that will be available to me even if there might not be an obvious use case.
I have one minor criticism. For many of the sections you left the title slide up while you explained the feature. When you advanced to the detail slide you had already covered it so you moved on. It would have been easier to process what you were saying if the detail slide had been visible while you were covering it.

Thanks for speaking :)

He did a good job convincing me that the new features were not very useful. Particularly I think it was poor judgment to say "If you are using these features, you are probably doing something wrong." It doesn't inspire excitement about the new features and shows a somewhat pessimistic view on them.

The examples were very difficult to understand but that isn't his fault. It's the nature of the topic, however, I suggest that the code be shown in a better color scheme because the dim projector lighting didn't lend itself well to the color on black.

Lastly, He explained that he doesn't use some of the slides because he does like reading off them. I feel that if he would have shown these slides, better notes could have been taken and the message would have been clearer. The truth is, one doesn't have to "read" the slides if they are shown.

Overall, it was an average talk.

I agree with Allen—if the point of the talk was that the new features are bad, that should have been reflected in the title of the talk, so we knew what we were getting into.

Personally, I think it's at least a coding style preference thing. These features are coming from newer dynamic languages and are very popular, so clearly someone thinks they can have value.

While I agree that you don't *need* most of the syntactic sugar in PHP 5.4, I don't know that this necessarily makes them bad features.

Got a bit lost in the switch back and forth between slides and live demo.

I'll echo some of the other comments, why show us some of those new bits when you're just going to tell us that using them is wrong? (Or using them in a particular manner.)

And while most of us understand that you want us to listen to you versus just reading what you say off of a slide, I found myself taking notes on one thing you said, then missing the next thing - which may have been on the slide so that I could catch up to where you were in the lecture.

I think the talk could have been improved by making it more of a "PHP 5.4: The new stuff I think is awesome" - and only covering those things, but in more depth.

Technically good and informative, but I agree with others that at times, the title slides vs. content slides were a bit confusing. Also, for code samples, colored text on black was tough to read.