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The transition from PHP3 to PHP4 and from PHP4 to PHP5 wasn't that painful. At the time, most PHP open source projects simply avoided OO concepts due to their s
by castell 11y ago
The transition from PHP3 to PHP4 and from PHP4 to PHP5 wasn't that painful. At the time, most PHP open source projects simply avoided OO concepts due to their slow implementation in PHP4 and to be downwards compatible with PHP3. It solved the transition as they only slowly adopted class based OO later in PHP5 era. Also the transition period of parallel version of PHP4 and 5 was between 2004 and 2008 - long enough so that most shared hosters were able to make the switch. PHP6 failed, and most planned features were backported to PHP5.3+. As several books were published in the months before the planned PHP6 release, the next PHP version will be named PHP7 to avoid any confusion. Nevertheless, PHP7 isn't a bigger change than let's say PHP 5.2 to 5.3. Overall I would say, PHP's developers and the community has done a great job. Modern PHP.net and HHVM are certainly better than their reputation. The same goes for MySQL and MariaDB.
- Macha 11y agoPHP4->PHP5 required the gophp5 campaign in the end (domain now occupied by squatters) where several open source projects (iirc, Drupal, WordPress and phpBB among them) committed to dropping php4 support to pressure shared hosts into upgrading. And that wasn't even a backwards incompatible change (unless you were using things already deprecated and disabled by default at the end of php4, like register_globals) Imagine if in 2-3 years, SQLAlchemy, Requests and SciPy for example dropped Python 2 which would be a similar Python attempt (not saying they would or should). That's some pretty forceful migration.
- stephenr 11y agoOne small (afaik) correction: Wordpress was never part of the GoPHP5 initiative. Wordpress has a terrible history of maintaining backwards compatibility over good design, and modernising their codebase. They only started to add support for a modern DB driver (mysqli) a bit over a year ago. MySQLi and PDO have been in PHP since v5.0 and v5.1, respectively, that's 11 and 10 years ago.
- Bahamut 11y agoIf anything, my takeaway here is that PHP might have handled things the best of the three. PHP doesn't have the huge schism that Python 3 does, and the development cycle isn't nearly as crazy as Perl. Sometimes pragmatism is more important than idealism.
- wvenable 11y agoThe process from PHP4 to PHP5 was long but there were clear advantages to PHP5 that it made it logical choice for all new projects. I'm still working with brand new Python 2.7 code.
- juliangregorian 11y agoWe don't know that, because PHP 7 isn't out yet, but also PHP 7 doesn't change in breaking ways. All of the language warts that plagued 4 and 5 are still around.
- Ultimatt 11y ago> the development cycle isn't nearly as crazy as Perl What regular releases every six months? With a standard mechanism for saying you are using a given new feature or expect a given versioned behaviour... yeah so cRaZzzY.