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The only thing stopping me from using PHP is just I’ve been burned in the past by massive breaking changes going up in major and even minor versions. Granted th

The only thing stopping me from using PHP is just I’ve been burned in the past by massive breaking changes going up in major and even minor versions. Granted they are major releases, but the amount of work to bring existing code up to “code” is a gargantuan amount of work. I’ve dealt with similar issues in Ruby as well as Rails, but it wasn’t too hard to fix and even older syntax is happily accepted without deprecation messages. With PHP, I’ve had to cleanup very verbose code (often from older open-source packages or software) and spent hours and hours cleaning up breaking changes.

wink 5y ago
The PHP 4->5 migration was harsh (but that was 2008 if I am not mistaken, the big 4.4 deadline was on 2008-08-08 and I've not heard anyone curse since then.
Minor49er 5y ago
This sounds like an issue with your upgrade process and not so much with PHP itself
NorwegianDude 5y ago
Not sure how long ago you used PHP, but backwards compatability has in my opinion been excellent for at least 15 years. A ~500k LOC PHP project has basically been effortless to keep up to date with the latest versions. From what I can remember I've only done search and replace a couple of times in that period.
ec109685 5y ago
The backwards compatibility story has been much better lately in php, including across major versions. There were some bad practices with previous versions that had to be cleaned up, unfortunately.
ransom1538 5y ago
Compared to phython2 vs phython3? What are you comparing it to? I can run php4 apps just fine. Good luck managing a phython2 app.
megous 5y ago
Well, code I wrote in 2006 still runs in production today, with very minor changes. I can't really be happier about backwards compatibility story. :) I guess I started writing PHP when PHP 5 was already a thing, didn't depend on any third party code, and used PDO from the start, so... I guess I was lucky to pick the right abstractions.

wink 5y ago

The PHP 4->5 migration was harsh (but that was 2008 if I am not mistaken, the big 4.4 deadline was on 2008-08-08 and I've not heard anyone curse since then.

Minor49er 5y ago

This sounds like an issue with your upgrade process and not so much with PHP itself

NorwegianDude 5y ago

Not sure how long ago you used PHP, but backwards compatability has in my opinion been excellent for at least 15 years. A ~500k LOC PHP project has basically been effortless to keep up to date with the latest versions. From what I can remember I've only done search and replace a couple of times in that period.

ec109685 5y ago

The backwards compatibility story has been much better lately in php, including across major versions. There were some bad practices with previous versions that had to be cleaned up, unfortunately.

ransom1538 5y ago

Compared to phython2 vs phython3? What are you comparing it to? I can run php4 apps just fine. Good luck managing a phython2 app.

megous 5y ago

Well, code I wrote in 2006 still runs in production today, with very minor changes. I can't really be happier about backwards compatibility story. :) I guess I started writing PHP when PHP 5 was already a thing, didn't depend on any third party code, and used PDO from the start, so... I guess I was lucky to pick the right abstractions.