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I wish every PHP developer would reread the docs and start using new features available instead of just continuing with what they know already just because it w

I wish every PHP developer would reread the docs and start using new features available instead of just continuing with what they know already just because it works. And of course if there was any way to remove all those old tutorials out there.

venomsnake 11y ago
And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.
- longwave 11y ago
  The performance improvements along with the support policy should hopefully encourage many sites to move to PHP 7 within a year; PHP 5.6 will be unsupported in 8 months (though it will receive security fixes for another year).
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    If you want to keep your sanity, don't ask the question how much of the web (even worse intraweb) is driven by php 4, 5.1 and 5.2.
  - jay-saint 11y ago
    Unfortunately several of the most popular PHP based platforms will be stuck using PHP 5.9 or older for some time. Magento just recently in version 1.9 added support for PHP 5.6. There are still an allarming number of Drupal 6 based sites out there in large scale production that have trouble supporting PHP > 5.4 The recent releases of Magento 2.0 and Drupal 8.0 should help move more sites to modern versions of PHP, but there is a lot of work still to be done on contrib modules to get full functionality out of M2 and D8
- aikah 11y ago
  > And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise. It will depend on hosting companies for some public websites and sysadmins for internal business apps. Ironically the sysadmins I know will be the hardest people to convince, for some reasons. that's basically why as much as I can , I chose solutions with no dependencies when I'm working on apps for internal use (like Go,Nim,..). It solves a whole lot of issues. I just can't stand having to convince someone else to do his job in order to do mine.
- ams6110 11y ago
  Our production environment is just this month upgrading to 5.6.
  - to3m 11y ago
    DreamHost are still in the process of upgrading to 5.5.
- cdnsteve 11y ago
  I'd disagree with this. Performance increases get attention from system admins. It will take time yes, but if it saves them money, they will likely investigate sooner.
- captn3m0 11y ago
  I interview a lot of php-devs, and a very large proportion of PHP shops are still on 5.4 or earlier (which is all EOL). Very often they are not at all aware of the new features in 5.5 and later. CodeIgniter is still popular and a lot of developers have no clue about namespaces and composer usage. It will really take a _long while_ before php7 becomes commonplace.
  - apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
    Yeah, this is where we're at. We have a ton of old servers running hundreds of sites, some of them up to 10 years old. It's just not feasible for us to upgrade those servers unless there is a massive security issue. So we have a lot of servers running 5.3 and 5.4. We currently run on Debian stable and don't upgrade any packages beyond what Debian is supporting. In all likelihood, we won't be using PHP 7 until the next major Debian release, which I believe is scheduled for April 2017. Regardless, we still have to support clients that are running older instances of PHP on their GoDaddy shared hosting. If it's not EOL, we can't justify not allowing them to use it so we're stuck with 5.5+ for the time being.
- Practicality 11y ago
  We will be going live with v7 as soon as I test it on the dev servers, so probably this week. Not everyone is so slow.
  - timdavila 11y ago
    Who is we?
    - Practicality 11y ago
      My business has a set of 4 public websites that run (mostly) on PHP. As the lead developer it is up to me (in this company) to decide when we upgrade.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  GoPHP5 successfully forced the community to move to 5 en masse. We can do the same again for 7 if we need to.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  Isn't that true for users of other major languages either? Java 1.4, Python 2, ES4, etc.
oblio 11y ago
PHP is very likely to be the language used by Mort: http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/ I doubt any of those developers are ever going to switch what they're already using unless they are forced by some external factor. The more serious factor is: if you're on Hackernews, you're at least Elvis or even Einstein. Mort is out of reach for most internet media for programmers.
- mei0Iesh 11y ago
  This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it. It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites. It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.
  - acdha 11y ago
    I agree with rejecting the elitist framing but … the web was decidedly not mostly static before PHP came along. Perl had many frameworks (e.g. PHP started as one), as did conventional languages like Java, Python, with deep server integration possible using things like mod_perl. There were also a bunch of web-specific dynamic platforms like Cold Fusion and classic ASP / me-too JSP. Finally, there was server-side JavaScript as one of Netscape's offerings in the mid-90s. What PHP added was primarily ease of use with the ability to deploy code simply by creating a single file, suitable for mass deployment at ISPs in the era where everyone used shared servers, and the combination of comparative ease of use with enough performance to do serious projects. Cold Fusion was also easy but didn't support things like persistent connections (read: order of magnitude slower) and the core language was very, very slow and also quite limited and buggy. You could find much faster options if you wanted to build, debug and deploy a conventional language like C++ or Java but the cost and risk was so much higher that this was unfavorable unless you really needed performance. EDIT: if you want a snapshot of what the 90s web was like, http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ was quite popular in the day. I know at least one well-known business which still has a revenue-generating website built in TCL, too…

venomsnake 11y ago

And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise.

longwave 11y ago
The performance improvements along with the support policy should hopefully encourage many sites to move to PHP 7 within a year; PHP 5.6 will be unsupported in 8 months (though it will receive security fixes for another year).
- venomsnake 11y ago
  If you want to keep your sanity, don't ask the question how much of the web (even worse intraweb) is driven by php 4, 5.1 and 5.2.
- jay-saint 11y ago
  Unfortunately several of the most popular PHP based platforms will be stuck using PHP 5.9 or older for some time. Magento just recently in version 1.9 added support for PHP 5.6. There are still an allarming number of Drupal 6 based sites out there in large scale production that have trouble supporting PHP > 5.4 The recent releases of Magento 2.0 and Drupal 8.0 should help move more sites to modern versions of PHP, but there is a lot of work still to be done on contrib modules to get full functionality out of M2 and D8
aikah 11y ago
> And every php developer would wish that suddenly all php in the world upgrades to v7. We are years away from 7 having a big penetration in the ecosystem. And years more till it hits enterprise. It will depend on hosting companies for some public websites and sysadmins for internal business apps. Ironically the sysadmins I know will be the hardest people to convince, for some reasons. that's basically why as much as I can , I chose solutions with no dependencies when I'm working on apps for internal use (like Go,Nim,..). It solves a whole lot of issues. I just can't stand having to convince someone else to do his job in order to do mine.
ams6110 11y ago
Our production environment is just this month upgrading to 5.6.
- to3m 11y ago
  DreamHost are still in the process of upgrading to 5.5.
cdnsteve 11y ago
I'd disagree with this. Performance increases get attention from system admins. It will take time yes, but if it saves them money, they will likely investigate sooner.
captn3m0 11y ago
I interview a lot of php-devs, and a very large proportion of PHP shops are still on 5.4 or earlier (which is all EOL). Very often they are not at all aware of the new features in 5.5 and later. CodeIgniter is still popular and a lot of developers have no clue about namespaces and composer usage. It will really take a _long while_ before php7 becomes commonplace.
- apocalyptic0n3 11y ago
  Yeah, this is where we're at. We have a ton of old servers running hundreds of sites, some of them up to 10 years old. It's just not feasible for us to upgrade those servers unless there is a massive security issue. So we have a lot of servers running 5.3 and 5.4. We currently run on Debian stable and don't upgrade any packages beyond what Debian is supporting. In all likelihood, we won't be using PHP 7 until the next major Debian release, which I believe is scheduled for April 2017. Regardless, we still have to support clients that are running older instances of PHP on their GoDaddy shared hosting. If it's not EOL, we can't justify not allowing them to use it so we're stuck with 5.5+ for the time being.
Practicality 11y ago
We will be going live with v7 as soon as I test it on the dev servers, so probably this week. Not everyone is so slow.
- timdavila 11y ago
  Who is we?
  - Practicality 11y ago
    My business has a set of 4 public websites that run (mostly) on PHP. As the lead developer it is up to me (in this company) to decide when we upgrade.
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
GoPHP5 successfully forced the community to move to 5 en masse. We can do the same again for 7 if we need to.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Isn't that true for users of other major languages either? Java 1.4, Python 2, ES4, etc.

oblio 11y ago

PHP is very likely to be the language used by Mort: http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/mort-elvis-einstein-and-you/ I doubt any of those developers are ever going to switch what they're already using unless they are forced by some external factor. The more serious factor is: if you're on Hackernews, you're at least Elvis or even Einstein. Mort is out of reach for most internet media for programmers.

mei0Iesh 11y ago
This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it. It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites. It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.
- acdha 11y ago
  I agree with rejecting the elitist framing but … the web was decidedly not mostly static before PHP came along. Perl had many frameworks (e.g. PHP started as one), as did conventional languages like Java, Python, with deep server integration possible using things like mod_perl. There were also a bunch of web-specific dynamic platforms like Cold Fusion and classic ASP / me-too JSP. Finally, there was server-side JavaScript as one of Netscape's offerings in the mid-90s. What PHP added was primarily ease of use with the ability to deploy code simply by creating a single file, suitable for mass deployment at ISPs in the era where everyone used shared servers, and the combination of comparative ease of use with enough performance to do serious projects. Cold Fusion was also easy but didn't support things like persistent connections (read: order of magnitude slower) and the core language was very, very slow and also quite limited and buggy. You could find much faster options if you wanted to build, debug and deploy a conventional language like C++ or Java but the cost and risk was so much higher that this was unfavorable unless you really needed performance. EDIT: if you want a snapshot of what the 90s web was like, http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ was quite popular in the day. I know at least one well-known business which still has a revenue-generating website built in TCL, too…