Bart van Bragt wrote:
There are some whacky things in PHP4 and PHP5 that need to be fixed and to fix that BC sometimes breaks. No problem with that. The problem is that you're breaking BC again while almost no-one has switched to PHP5 yet because of the BC breaks between 4.x and 5.0. Breaking BC again is certainly not going to help the adoption of PHP5. Please just accept that things can't move at the speed that you'd like. It takes ages before people upgrade, that's just the way it is. Breaking BC won't force people to upgrade, it will keep them from upgrading.
I think the problem is that constantly breaking a bit of BC is worse than breaking BC once a bit more severly. To me the main principle of PHP was ease of use. However alot of wacky things have resulted in reducing the number of people that can truely understand any PHP code to a very small elite. So unless we shed ourselves of the past at some point we are in danger of killing off one of the key advantages of PHP.
Of course there is an inherite danger in taking this step. Will the userbase migrate to that new PHP version or will they jump ship towards Ruby on Rails and friends? It hard to tell, but if we make sure that this new language can compete with the other languages on the block (already existing or emerging) we shouldn't be worried about that future. Actually not taking this step might result in a situation where we will eventually find ourselves more and more wasting time on past mistakes. I doubt this will be good for any of us in the long run. While I doubt we will see alot of core people moving to other languages we will some day wake up to find little influx of new people who are willing to join this "mess". This will in turn kill off another key advantage of PHP which was the quick adoption of new possibilities and the rapid expansion of possibilities.
I think that eZ is an example of a company that shows its willing to take a risk in betting their money on PHP6 only, because they are producing a product that will then simply be on a cleaner basis for its customers. Other companies in much more controlled environments would be able to take a step like this much more easily. I know I would much more happily embrace a cleaned up PHP6 compared to a somewhat BC PHP5.
regards, Lukas -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
