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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Future stability of PHP?
From: stephan.soller@helionweb.de (Stephan Soller)

On 08.04.23 23:04, Ilija Tovilo wrote:
 > Hi Stephan
 >
 >> I'm sorry if this isn't the correct mailing list for that discussion 
but I
 >> couldn't find a more appropriate one where people actually know how the
 >> wind is
 >> blowing.
 >
 > No worries, this seems like the appropriate place.
 >
 >> Is there a way to tell which APIs and language features will be stable
 >> and which
 >> might get changed or removed in the future? That way I could restrict
 >> myself to
 >> a stable subset for long-running projects (5 to 10 years). But I realize
 >> that
 >> such guarantees are difficult (or contra productive) when a language is
 >> in flux
 >> and I can understand if no one wants to do something like that.
 >
 > There's no such guarantee at the moment. Anything that is agreed upon
 > by the 2/3 majority of voters is subject to change.
 >
 >> Some of my projects run for 5 to 10 years, in one case even 20 years.
 >
 > There are companies that offer extended lifecycle support for PHP
 > versions that have officially reached EOL (examples being Zend or
 > TuxCare). I'm not sure if those will get you to that 10 year mark.
 > Note however that deprecation notices alone should not keep you from
 > upgrading to a newer version, as they don't have any runtime effect
 > with a correct production configuration and thus aren't considered
 > breaking. We generally postpone larger breaking changes to major
 > versions. In general, I do agree that we could minimize breaking
 > changes more, and limit them to the things that actually provide a
 > tangible benefit.

Thanks for mentioning the extended lifecycle support. I wasn't aware of
that. Looks like even some webhosters provide something similar so it
might even be an option for small customers (restaurants, etc.).

 >
 > Sadly, there's a conflict of interest here. There are people who want
 > to keep running their existing websites without having to make any
 > changes, and there are people who are using PHP daily and would like
 > to see the language evolve. We would like to satisfy both of these
 > groups but that is difficult when they are often directly opposed. I
 > do think that if we only manage to satisfy the former, PHP will
 > gradually become less and less significant. That would be sad.

Yes, this seems to be the prevalent mindset people like to group
themselves into. I don't have any good answers about that but a few
languages seemed to have handled that rather well.

Fortran for one changed a lot since its inception while still being very
stable. And before the first one says that it's dead, a dinosaur or
whatever: I thought so as well before I worked at a super computing
center for a while (around 2010). There pretty much everything was
written in Fortran and still is as far as I can tell. The language gets
an update every 10 years or so and it's still a pretty good tool for
physicists and engineers to write high-performance simulations. With
Fortran 95 you can almost write Ruby-like code if you care about
readability. Not that physicist do that since they name everything
alpha, theta, phidash, etc. which doesn't help. Anyway, there might be
something interesting to learn from languages that navigated the same
problems before.

Disclaimer: I'm not that old but I'm curious how programming as a
discipline is done and changes in different fields and industries. So I
dabble in a lot of different things.

Happy programming
Stephan