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I also like PHP. It is also an awful language, though, and always has been. Inconsistent parameter ordering, the infamous NULL/0/""/FALSE heffalump trap, object

I also like PHP. It is also an awful language, though, and always has been. Inconsistent parameter ordering, the infamous NULL/0/""/FALSE heffalump trap, object-orientation as an afterthought. Many more. It's OK once you know the language well, but a lot of PHP developers don't. I have a PHP app written in PHP5.6, for my own use (not exposed on the internet). Naturally it broke when I upgraded to Debian Buster. Upgrading the code would have taken ages; but it took me just a day or so to work out how to get PHP5.6 working on Buster. I've retired, because I can, and because I prefer not to work if I don't have to. There's a pretty steep learning curve from PHP5 to PHP8; I don't want to do that learning, if it's no longer necessary for my job, and I'm only using it for a private app. I've not used PHP8 on anything serious, but my impression is that it's a HUGE improvement on PHP5. It's a lot more coherent, a lot faster, and a lot more secure. A lot of what has been dropped was dropped because it was insecure crap - it had to go sooner or later. In the end it was "better late than never".

thomaslord 5y ago
I think PHP7+ has provided a lot in terms of modernization and focus on the OO paradigm. For what it's worth, there are a couple of tools out there that should help getting your personal app up and running on PHP7 if you're interested in doing that at some point. Most of the breaking changes I've run into are because deprecated features were removed, which in a lot of cases seemed like strange/wrong syntax to me anyway. I have a legacy app that can't feasibly be updated past 5.6 because it uses a totally undocumented framework that wasn't built in-house. While I could run one of the tools I mentioned, 99% of the framework code probably never runs so there would be a lot of work done for nothing.

thomaslord 5y ago

I think PHP7+ has provided a lot in terms of modernization and focus on the OO paradigm. For what it's worth, there are a couple of tools out there that should help getting your personal app up and running on PHP7 if you're interested in doing that at some point. Most of the breaking changes I've run into are because deprecated features were removed, which in a lot of cases seemed like strange/wrong syntax to me anyway. I have a legacy app that can't feasibly be updated past 5.6 because it uses a totally undocumented framework that wasn't built in-house. While I could run one of the tools I mentioned, 99% of the framework code probably never runs so there would be a lot of work done for nothing.