3 ms·

What people continue to fail to explain is why PHP needs to be replaced. Why not improve it? After the millions of man hours that have gone into the plethora

What people continue to fail to explain is why PHP needs to be replaced. Why not improve it? After the millions of man hours that have gone into the plethora of open source PHP based frameworks and tools (aka, what powers the internet) - wouldn't we as a community want to improve the foundations rather then scrap them entirely? You know, like what happened with Javascript...

btilly 14y ago
The one thing that can never be fixed is a poorly chosen feature. PHP has a lot of them. And they interact badly.
- berntb 14y ago
  Yes, but... All languages (like any system) will have cruft, after a while. Is the solution really to do a periodic break with backwards compatibility for purity reasons, Python 3 style? There should be a better way?! What about a low level machine like Java/.Net and just let the next language evolve on top of that -- so old libraries could run? (Maybe there could be Xcompilers for Ruby/Perl 6/xxx to the Perl "bytecode", to take advantage of CPAN?)
  - btilly 14y ago
    Some things simply can never be fixed. Figuring out when that happened to you is a judgement call.
    - blindhippo 14y ago
      List them out, explain them, show your work... If us PHP developers have such bad judgement, show us the error of our ways. And do not link to some other persons blog post - explain it yourself.
      - btilly 14y ago
        Why should I bother following your demands? If you've ignored a million blog posts that clearly explain it, you'll ignore me as well. And if you don't have enough experience of better programming languages that the warts are obvious, then what I could have to say would make no sense to you. To you it would be just the way things are - even though they aren't that way for other developers in other languages.
brlewis 14y ago
When you "improve" inconsistency and misfeatures, you're essentially replacing anyway. Else you're building a mess of backward compatibility like in the fopen() example in http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
jlgreco 14y ago
This strikes me as an example of the sunken costs fallacy.

btilly 14y ago

The one thing that can never be fixed is a poorly chosen feature. PHP has a lot of them. And they interact badly.

berntb 14y ago
Yes, but... All languages (like any system) will have cruft, after a while. Is the solution really to do a periodic break with backwards compatibility for purity reasons, Python 3 style? There should be a better way?! What about a low level machine like Java/.Net and just let the next language evolve on top of that -- so old libraries could run? (Maybe there could be Xcompilers for Ruby/Perl 6/xxx to the Perl "bytecode", to take advantage of CPAN?)
- btilly 14y ago
  Some things simply can never be fixed. Figuring out when that happened to you is a judgement call.
  - blindhippo 14y ago
    List them out, explain them, show your work... If us PHP developers have such bad judgement, show us the error of our ways. And do not link to some other persons blog post - explain it yourself.
    - btilly 14y ago
      Why should I bother following your demands? If you've ignored a million blog posts that clearly explain it, you'll ignore me as well. And if you don't have enough experience of better programming languages that the warts are obvious, then what I could have to say would make no sense to you. To you it would be just the way things are - even though they aren't that way for other developers in other languages.

brlewis 14y ago

When you "improve" inconsistency and misfeatures, you're essentially replacing anyway. Else you're building a mess of backward compatibility like in the fopen() example in http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...

jlgreco 14y ago

This strikes me as an example of the sunken costs fallacy.