Finally!

I kinda liked the ordered imports in Laravel, even though I alpha order my own code. :P

I'm with Graham. I don't see any valuable reason to change.

I could see one valuable reason for a future: alpha ordered imports could be easily groupped.

Instead:

use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable as UserContract;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\UserProvider;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Hashing\Hasher as HasherContract;

You could have:

use Illuminate\Contracts\{
    Auth\Authenticatable as UserContract,
    Auth\UserProvider,
    Hashing\Hasher as HasherContract
};

why is the grouping valuable?

I'm not a fan of grouping myself 😅

Me too, but it's an example what you can easily do with alpha ordered imports and what will require much more changes with length ordered imports.

In fact - I don't like to make changes in framework and check if my IDE isn't reordered imports before pushing the changes. For me it's much clear to have them ordered by name and to see all the imports from similar namespace near to each other and not to track down all the list to find what I want.

Is there at least one benefit to keep length ordered imports?

Is there at least one benefit to have length ordered imports?

More consistency with the rest of the PHP open source community.

@driesvints length ordered imports? really? I always thought that alpha ordered imports is standard for PHP.

Edit: I've changed "have" on "keep". I suppose it was a reason of your misread.

@antonkomarev ah sorry, I meant alpha ordered.

The IDEs are gonna be pissed we hounded them for so long about making length ordering an option for auto-formatting, and now we go and just switch anyway. 😅

Strange move, as this exact change received so much push-back for years. Then suddenly, without explanation the change is made. To me, this was one of the many things that made the codebase a joy to peruse.

worst PR ever.... length ordered imports is so much cleaner looking.

And now they are easier to perceive. What better, pretty look or better readability?

If you have a decent ide, you never have to perceive anything. They just sit at the top of your classes. Before laravel I would have never sorted by length but after years of doing it that way, I’ve grown to love it.

Ordering alphabetically gives you a directory-like view of the imports which imo is a better 1-on-1 mapping when you browse a file directory. Ordering by length doesn't has any real benefit.