On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 2:27 PM, Pierre Joye <pierre....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 8:15 PM, Zeev Suraski <z...@zend.com> wrote: > > > 3. The motivation to skip 6 doesn't stem from marketing at all. The main > motivation is that there's a VERY concrete perception amongst many users > about what PHP 6 is. > > Leaving the very small conference crowd for a second: nobody never > ever heard of php6 before the total fiasco a couple of months ago. Nobody ever heard of PHP 6? If you visit amazon.com and try search for "php 6", you'll see no less than 6 books (I stopped counting) all containing PHP 6 in the title. In the general PHP list, you'll see that developers reference PHP 6 when speaking of how to handle unicode, and how you will handle unicode in the future. If you search Google for "php 6", you'll be greeted with hundreds of blog posts speaking of how to prepare for the coming changes in PHP 6 or other aspects of its development. The title "PHP 6" has much baggage. The perception in the general community is strong and pervasive, and it certainly is not limited to a small conference crowd. Developers have strongly conceived expectations about what PHP 6 will entail, and as the releases creep towards an eventual 6.0, the growing divergence between the expectations and the actual releases will likely cause confusion and frustration. Given the expectations, the strength of the enhancements coming in this next release (significant engine rewrites, traits, APC, etc.), and the trend in nomenclature for software versions, I believe the case for jumping to a 7.0 release makes sense. I'm not an active contributor to the PHP core and I have no patches to my name, so I'm not sure what my vote is worth. However, I do actively help those on the general mailing list who are trying to learn basic PHP or are trying to troubleshoot new code, and it's the general developers in userland who will benefit from the most from the clear separation from the expectations. Adam -- Nephtali: PHP web framework that functions beautifully http://nephtaliproject.com
