I'm just a PHP programmer for work, but I worry about the orientation PHP has chosen. As French people say: better is the enemy of good (Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien). The two new language features bring a higher language complexity for dubious gains. I hope I won't have to work with these.

Property hooks mean that some language magic will turn a property access into a call to methods. It implies that `$this->x` has a different meaning if it's inside a hook or outside hooks. I've used this kind of feature (getters/setters) with JS code (and with Moose/Perl decades ago), and I wasn't convinced. Plain methods are more explicit, have less cognitive charge, and are easier to extend.

On the bright side, I'm glad that the language is still thriving. In 2021, I was worried when the foundation was created, especially as I read that Nikita Popov had left. He was the creator of PHP's JIT code, and at the time the only developer who could fully understand it. But it seems there was no need to worry. PHP is now longer "the elephant in the room" of web programming, but it's still a good language, with many active developers at its core.

I was curious about why setting `$this->countryCode` inside the setter for `countryCode` didn't result in infinite recursion. Turns out this is spelled out in the RFC, but not in the docs:

   When a hook is called, inside that hook $this->[propertyName] will refer to the “unfiltered” value of the property, called the “backing value.” When accessed from anywhere else, $this->[propertyName] calls will go through the relevant hook. This is true for all hooks on the same property. This includes, for example, writing to a property from the get hook; that will write to the backing value, bypassing the set hook.
   
   A normal property has a stored “backing value” that is part of the object, and part of the memory layout of the class. However, if a property has at least one hook, and none of them make use of $this->[propertyName], then no backing value will be created and there will be no data stored in the object automatically (just as if there were no property, just methods). Such properties are known as “virtual properties,” as they have no materialized stored value.
   
   Be aware, the detection logic works on $this->[propertyName] directly at compile time, not on dynamic forms of it like $prop = 'beep'; $this->$prop. That will not trigger a backing value.

Feels like too much magic to me that a property access can mean different things depending on context, but I'm not a PHP user, so I don't get a vote.

I'm most excited for property hooks. Having getters and setters as part of the language syntax was something I dearly missed from my C# days, nearly two decades ago.

In my projects I sometimes emulate getters and setters using `__get()` and `__set()` but that's heavy-handed and requires lots of PHPDoc annotation for type checking. Property hooks look awesome!

Great PHP release. Better stack traces for closures, performance improvements (always nice), HTML5 support, lazy objects and much more. Great work and a big thanks to everyone involved!

Am I the only one excited about bcmath objects? Not so much because of arithmetic operators, but mostly because now we can do data types checks without resorting to wrapper classes. Nice!