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Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:48:03 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Future stability of PHP?
From: a.leathley@gmx.net (Andreas Leathley)

On 10.04.23 01:44, Deleu wrote:
> Over the course of PHP 7 and 8, there were significant concerns on how
> problematic PHP deprecations and breaking changes were. Now we're starti=
ng
> to see the result of such concerns being ignored. This isn't the first t=
ime
> someone mentions on PHP internals that it's getting harder and harder to
> stay with PHP, but it's never really received with an open mind. It's
> either "you don't have to run deprecation-free code" or "you've had year=
s
> to get rid of that deprecation error, tough luck if you didn't".
>
> I love PHP and I built my career around it. I have zero interest in
> starting from scratch in another language, but I've lost count on how ma=
ny
> projects, friends and companies around me have already made the switch t=
o
> Typescript. It's getting harder and harder to argue in favour of staying
> with PHP.

The PHP ecosystem even just in the last 10 years has changed completely,
with composer, more mature frameworks, easily usable independent
components and even static analyzers. For me that ecosystem is the big
value proposition of PHP, in addition to a good standard library.
Typescript has a completely different value proposition, and the
language itself is usually not the deciding factor, as there is so much
more to it.

Only through the deprecations and the type system does PHP even offer
some similar features as Typescript - like type checks and the
possibility of a static analyzer. If all these changes would not have
happened, people likely would argue even more that they had to switch to
Typescript, because of the missing type safety in PHP. Nowadays there
are even tools now like Rector that can help you automatically upgrade
your codebase - that is also a new value proposition. My projects were
affected by all the new warnings, deprecations etc. over the years, but
I found countless bugs because of those (and many bad choices - is
count($string) really what I wanted?). The language warning you when you
are likely doing something with little sense is a huge value proposition
- otherwise why are people using Typescript instead of Javascript?

It would be interesting to know why some people are having such huge
problems upgrading their applications, as I think those would often be
good stories with something to learn in them. So to the original poster
or other people with big problems when upgrading, writing a blog article
detailing what happened would be helpful to evaluate if the PHP project
could improve something, or even why something broke. And just as a
sidenote: I never have more things breaking than when trying to upgrade
a JS/TS-project, because of changes in NodeJS, because of slight breaks
in dependencies, etc. To me that clearly works better in PHP, but
experiences can differ.