"Andrey Andreev" wrote in message
news:CAPhkiZz=gYDbHngV+gHhTgW415_KxoCU-31OiW=dxPkPg=t...@mail.gmail.com...
Hi,
On Mon, Jan 19, 2015 at 5:01 PM, Tony Marston <tonymars...@hotmail.com>
wrote:
But the only benefits with the removal of old features is a smaller
code
base for the core developers. The only "benefit" which is experienced
in
userland is that applications which have run for over a decade suddenly
stop
working.
Ah, so you admit there may be benefits? Again, I do not say that those
benefits are definitely enough to justify the change in this case, but
they
are real, and I would like you to stop dismissing them.
There is a big difference if a BC break which causes a minor benefit to
the
core developers also causes a major headache to the millions of
developers
who are the customers, the people who use the language to develop
applications. The aim should be to eliminate customer grievances as much
as
possible and not to simply ignore them.
You continue doing exactly what you were asked not to.
If I wish to complain I don't need to ask your permission. I also have the
right to respond to every post which argues against my opinion.
It's not just a "minor benefit to the core developers". It's an
extremely unpopular feature
"Unpopular" means that people want to see it removed just because they don't
like it.
that often leads to debugging nightmares even for users with enough
experience to take on senior development roles.
Ignorance about how PHP works is no excuse. I believe that "RTFM" is the
standard response in such situations.
PHP 4 style coding is just unknown to the majority of users today and
But not for those users who started developing with PHP before version 5
became mainstream. Your attitude seems to be "Let's ignore those boring old
farts who made the language what it is today and instead start pandering to
a bunch of ignorant newbies".
most people assume that it is no longer supported
Then most people assumed wrongly. Why should one section of the PHP
community be made to suffer because of a wrong assumption made by another
part of the community?
(or rather, that it
was never supported, because they don't even know it existed).
Just because a bunch of newbies didn't realise that a feature existed is no
reason to remove that feature. There are functions in the language that I
don't use and have no desire to use, but do you see me advocating for their
removal?
You're
obviously an exception to that, and you might argue that somebody's
lack of knowledge isn't an excuse to break all of your code, but
please stop arguing that a handful of core PHP developers decided to
drop a feature for their own benefit alone. That is simply not true.
What benefit will there be to the PHP community outside of the core
developers? Applications which don't use PHP 4 constructors will not notice
a difference, but those which do will break. Where is the benefit in that?
Also, I haven't seen PHP4 style constructors used in years and you're
making it sound like every PHP application on the internet uses them -
very far from it.
Just because you haven't seen any does not mean that they don't exist. It
has already been pointed out that there are a large number of PEAR libraries
which were written with PHP 4 constructors and have never been updated.
That being said, it is still a major BC issue and unfortunately we're
not going to have PHP 5.7 where it could've been deprecated, so I
guess being stuck with this feature (but deprecated) in PHP7 might be
the wiser choice.
Cheers,
Andrey.
--
Tony Marston
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