> Deprecation notices won't change people's *desire* to change their code. If you raised a deprecation notice for every call to, say "htmlspecialchars", the only result would be people turning off deprecation notices, and missing more important deprecations.
You have a point here. Couldn't we add a "deprecated log" feature, that would log each deprecated function only once? At least we could leave an app running for some time, and get a curated list of deprecated features from the deprecated log. On Fri, 1 Feb 2019 at 11:11, Rowan Collins <rowan.coll...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, 31 Jan 2019 at 22:39, Benjamin Morel <benjamin.mo...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> What if people's muscle memory, their coding standards, their need for > progressive compatibility, their tools, the tutorials they follow, the code > snippets they copy, all make it easier to just keep using the old names? > >> Then our "deprecation" means nothing, and we are stuck with a long list > of aliases to maintain, and people learning the language scratching their > heads at inconsistent examples. > > > Deprecation notices. Tooling also helps a lot here: IDEs (PHPStorm for > example, strikes through deprecated method names), and static code analysis > tools. > > Deprecation notices won't change people's *desire* to change their code. > If you raised a deprecation notice for every call to, say > "htmlspecialchars", the only result would be people turning off deprecation > notices, and missing more important deprecations. > > > >> ... although it takes us close to "completely new language" > territory. > > > Maybe not, if this can be done in a mostly BC way. > > It wasn't the BC I was worrying about there, but the possibility that > projects would adopt one style or the other, and readers coming from an > "old-style" project might find the code in a "new-style" project rather > alien. In a worst case scenario, it would feel like we had two languages > interoperating on the same runtime, like when HHVM hosted both PHP and > Hack. It's not inevitable, though, just a risk to think about if we ever > get to that position. > > Regards, > -- > Rowan Collins > [IMSoP] >
