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I envy the fast development cycles the PHP language developer team is doing. From five years until now, I’d say PHP has had a completely overhaul since the time

I envy the fast development cycles the PHP language developer team is doing. From five years until now, I’d say PHP has had a completely overhaul since the time I stopped web development.

pirate787 4y ago
As a long-time PHP developer, its way too fast. We're forced to constantly upgrade for features that don't really matter for most uses, but aren't backwards compatible.
- NorwegianDude 4y ago
  What do you mean? Backwards compatibility in PHP is amazing. I have several large projects that I've been working on for 15+ years, and upgrading to newer PHP versions has been a dream. What kind of things are you having problems with in regards to backwards compatibility?
  - pirate787 4y ago
    The issues I'm having are with the ecosystem downstream. A lot of projects are abandoning annotations in favor of attributes, for example.
    - onlypositive 4y ago
      I abandon those projects. You know they'll pull the same crap just as fast next time.
      - nolok 4y ago
        While "abandon those projects" doesn't help someone who developped something with it and need to keep them updated, the fact is that you can just keep using the older version of the library while you do your update it works just fine on newer PHP, AND pretty much any decent sized projects doing such a switch has a large transition period where they support both, AND tooling to automate such upgrade exists AND we should be very happy about removing code from comments.
    - nolok 4y ago
      Most big projects offer a large transition period. And their "older" version works just fine on latest PHP versions anyway, so you have the time to do your upgrade. And the tooling to make such upgrade is very stable and well working, rector does 99% of the job.
  - yucky 4y ago
    I love PHP, and think updates over the last several years have been relatively painless. But it doesn't feel like it's always been that way over the last 15 years.
- kyriakos 4y ago
  Never had trouble upgrading since jumping from 5.6 to 7.1. Changes are minor and can mostly be automated via tooling.
- Implicated 4y ago
  As someone maintaining multiple 10+ year old PHP applications - after the migration to 7 things have been super easy/simple. Especially if you get Rector [0] involved. [0] https://github.com/rectorphp/rector https://github.com/rectorphp/rector
  - jalapenos 4y ago
    Awesome, thanks for sharing this
  - tommek4077 4y ago
    Even if not. I have a big project running since 2006 and only had to change a handful of lines in that time once (+350k loc).
  - dgb23 4y ago
    Whether it’s easy or not in your particular space isn’t the problem. The problem is that it breaks period. Some applications might be easy to upgrade. Others will not. You are forced to do work, because for some minority it feels nicer when they get to use that new feature. And it has to look a certain way, no matter the cost! Some of the stuff that’s comming will be even worse. The even bigger issue is that your underlying tool breaks, which has an impact on dependecies as well. Foo needs version N now, but you also depend on Bar which only works with N-1. It’s not fun, and it’s expensive.
    - nolok 4y ago
      This makes no sense. You are under no obligation to upgrade your php version as soon as released without being able to plan for it. PHP 8.1.17 was released alongside 8.2.4 for exemple.
      - chrisandchris 4y ago
        I think PHP is missing some kind of LTS which adds another year (or two) of support or some more stability. I wanted to say Dotnet has a longer cycle, but they have 2 years for regular and 4 year for LTS releases, while PHP has 3 years for every minor. So not that much better. However, I had to migrate some 30k LOC app from Dotnet 3 to 6 this year and it was quite straight forward. Not that many thinks broke, and when then they were in the bootstrapping of the app. I'm not that much into PHP anymore, so my take might be wrong. I wouldn't like to upgrade each year to a new version which breaks syntax. I would be ok to migrate every 3 or 4 years from LTS to LTS.
- nolok 4y ago
  You're going to need to give exemples here. Upgrading has been super simple. The one time you actually may have had to work on things was with PHP 7, but that's because they finally removed things that had been deprecated for years, some for over a decade, and all of them were security risks or massive code smell anyway. The one thing with PHP 8 was the removal of dynamic propery, and again that's a massive code smell that was holding the language back. Any code still using it when PHP 8 released was either written over a decade ago, or something that has way more issues than that with upgrading.
  - nigamanth 4y ago
    Yeah, laravel also stays the same.

I envy the fast development cycles the PHP language developer team is doing. From five years until now, I’d say PHP has had a completely overhaul since the time I stopped web development.

pirate787 4y ago

As a long-time PHP developer, its way too fast. We're forced to constantly upgrade for features that don't really matter for most uses, but aren't backwards compatible.

NorwegianDude 4y ago
What do you mean? Backwards compatibility in PHP is amazing. I have several large projects that I've been working on for 15+ years, and upgrading to newer PHP versions has been a dream. What kind of things are you having problems with in regards to backwards compatibility?
- pirate787 4y ago
  The issues I'm having are with the ecosystem downstream. A lot of projects are abandoning annotations in favor of attributes, for example.
  - onlypositive 4y ago
    I abandon those projects. You know they'll pull the same crap just as fast next time.
    - nolok 4y ago
      While "abandon those projects" doesn't help someone who developped something with it and need to keep them updated, the fact is that you can just keep using the older version of the library while you do your update it works just fine on newer PHP, AND pretty much any decent sized projects doing such a switch has a large transition period where they support both, AND tooling to automate such upgrade exists AND we should be very happy about removing code from comments.
  - nolok 4y ago
    Most big projects offer a large transition period. And their "older" version works just fine on latest PHP versions anyway, so you have the time to do your upgrade. And the tooling to make such upgrade is very stable and well working, rector does 99% of the job.
- yucky 4y ago
  I love PHP, and think updates over the last several years have been relatively painless. But it doesn't feel like it's always been that way over the last 15 years.
kyriakos 4y ago
Never had trouble upgrading since jumping from 5.6 to 7.1. Changes are minor and can mostly be automated via tooling.
Implicated 4y ago
As someone maintaining multiple 10+ year old PHP applications - after the migration to 7 things have been super easy/simple. Especially if you get Rector [0] involved. [0] https://github.com/rectorphp/rector https://github.com/rectorphp/rector
- jalapenos 4y ago
  Awesome, thanks for sharing this
- tommek4077 4y ago
  Even if not. I have a big project running since 2006 and only had to change a handful of lines in that time once (+350k loc).
- dgb23 4y ago
  Whether it’s easy or not in your particular space isn’t the problem. The problem is that it breaks period. Some applications might be easy to upgrade. Others will not. You are forced to do work, because for some minority it feels nicer when they get to use that new feature. And it has to look a certain way, no matter the cost! Some of the stuff that’s comming will be even worse. The even bigger issue is that your underlying tool breaks, which has an impact on dependecies as well. Foo needs version N now, but you also depend on Bar which only works with N-1. It’s not fun, and it’s expensive.
  - nolok 4y ago
    This makes no sense. You are under no obligation to upgrade your php version as soon as released without being able to plan for it. PHP 8.1.17 was released alongside 8.2.4 for exemple.
    - chrisandchris 4y ago
      I think PHP is missing some kind of LTS which adds another year (or two) of support or some more stability. I wanted to say Dotnet has a longer cycle, but they have 2 years for regular and 4 year for LTS releases, while PHP has 3 years for every minor. So not that much better. However, I had to migrate some 30k LOC app from Dotnet 3 to 6 this year and it was quite straight forward. Not that many thinks broke, and when then they were in the bootstrapping of the app. I'm not that much into PHP anymore, so my take might be wrong. I wouldn't like to upgrade each year to a new version which breaks syntax. I would be ok to migrate every 3 or 4 years from LTS to LTS.
nolok 4y ago
You're going to need to give exemples here. Upgrading has been super simple. The one time you actually may have had to work on things was with PHP 7, but that's because they finally removed things that had been deprecated for years, some for over a decade, and all of them were security risks or massive code smell anyway. The one thing with PHP 8 was the removal of dynamic propery, and again that's a massive code smell that was holding the language back. Any code still using it when PHP 8 released was either written over a decade ago, or something that has way more issues than that with upgrading.
- nigamanth 4y ago
  Yeah, laravel also stays the same.