Newsgroups: php.internals Path: news.php.net Xref: news.php.net php.internals:106746 Return-Path: Delivered-To: mailing list internals@lists.php.net Received: (qmail 20242 invoked from network); 28 Aug 2019 18:40:15 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.localdomain) (76.75.200.58) by pb1.pair.com with SMTP; 28 Aug 2019 18:40:15 -0000 To: internals@lists.php.net References: <7ddbae5c-7451-4094-8b32-19676128054b@thelounge.net> <5d6699ce.1c69fb81.e9b71.2525SMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING@mx.google.com> Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 17:12:27 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-GB Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Posted-By: 94.4.34.143 Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] Reclassifying engine warnings From: markyr@gmail.com (Mark Randall) Message-ID: On 28/08/2019 16:37, Chase Peeler wrote: > I'm also not the one that built it on the eggshells - I'm just the one that > is now in charge of developing the system that someone else left sitting > eggshells. That's a challenge which at some point or another will face all technical leads. You have to go to the people making the decisions and say: "Okay, look, we've got ourselves a problem here. We've dug ourselves into a hole by cutting corners, building up debt, and we've never made it a priority to fix it, and now it's causing us problems. It's not one person's fault, it's something that has collectively developed over time, but the reality is, the problem is there and needs fixing." And when the manager asks "What problems?" you say something like: "The language we use is moving towards a much stricter approach to handling ambiguous or error prone code. This can only be considered a good thing, but it is going to mean that a lot of our technical debt is going to manifest as errors that will stop our site from function..." Then the manager will go "Can't we just keep using the version we are on?" You reply: "We can for a short period, perhaps an extra year or two, but the reality is that PHP is moving forward, and the current version won't be supported forever, and even if it were, we would be missing out on major performance enhancements and new features that could help us to build new features". The manager says: "Lay this out to me" You reply: "It's like our company car still works, but it no longer tighter meets emissions standards so they won't let us take it into the city any more" "Crap", the boss replies "Okay, we had best fix that" -- Mark Randall