Newsgroups: php.internals Path: news.php.net Xref: news.php.net php.internals:107482 Return-Path: Delivered-To: mailing list internals@lists.php.net Received: (qmail 12287 invoked from network); 10 Oct 2019 22:44:09 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO localhost.localdomain) (76.75.200.58) by pb1.pair.com with SMTP; 10 Oct 2019 22:44:09 -0000 To: internals@lists.php.net References: <5d976928.1c69fb81.db3a8.78daSMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING@mx.google.com> <82012CD7-088D-4010-922E-AD54186AE37A@newclarity.net> <67A49D41-A65F-4C07-82B2-1C19F17B2200@newclarity.net> <826c5050-6f7b-33c8-d856-60996b6210f3@gmail.com> Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2019 21:27:09 +0100 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.9.0 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: 5.69.57.161 Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Internals "camps" From: marandall@php.net (Mark Randall) Message-ID: On 10/10/2019 20:59, Walter Parker wrote: > They will either be stuck on an old version of PHP or have to pay to update the code. If you're getting stuck on a island after being given 4 or 5 years warning that the bridge to it will be closed, after being pointed to the ferry, given free tickets to that ferry, and being told it will continue to run long after, that's your own fault. > This pushes the > costs on them to solve a an existing issue that 20 years after it was > created and is now an issue because a new generation of coders, unaware of > history, find the existing syntax not to there taste/a poor design. History does not mean it was a good idea at the time, and even if it was, that doesn't mean it's a good idea now. Times move on. Your argument could easily be reversed... An old generation of coders, stuck in their ways, inflexible, preferring what they know rather than changing with the times for the greater good. > Why are > we giving priority to people that haven't taken the time to educate > themselves over people that did and used programming style that used to > common? We're assuming that in a general purpose programming languages, most programmers expect a function call to look like a function call, and not a string. We're assuming that people don't just go from never having touched PHP, to expert level, knowing all its quirks and secrets, within a few hours. We're assuming that there's a heck of a lot more to stewardship of the language than backwards compatibility. So let's look at it from the perspective of what we can do... We can either a) Find a way to reach out to every PHP programmer in the world and let them know that there's these special operators that look like a string, but actually aren't, and they do something that can be really dangerous, and they'll probably never see it but god help them if it's there and they miss it. or b) We add one line of code and warn people that we're eventually going to remove a rarely used and poorly understood syntax, and people should at some point in the next 4 or 5 migrate to the much more obvious shell_exec. By writing the RFC, it's pretty obvious which one I think is the best and most realistic course of action. Mark Randall