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Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:54:19 +0100
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Wake up
From: lester@lsces.co.uk (Lester Caine)

Philip Sturgeon wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
>> Terence Copestake wrote:
>>>
>>> There's a conflict between people who want to keep PHP
>>> simple and accessible and people who want to make PHP into a professional
>>> programming tool/environment, complete with all bells and whistles.
>>
>>
>> You see that is part of the problem here. What proportion of the internet is
>> powered by the current and older versions of PHP? What is 'so wrong' that
>> it's not already a 'professional tool'? I've been using PHP since just
>> before PHP5 was finalised and I don't find anything wrong with the code I
>> produce using it, and I am making 'professional' websites and services for
>> 'professionals'.
>
> There is nothing "so wrong" that it is not already a professional
> tool, obviously, but it can certainly be improved. Adding short array
> syntax, short-ternary, array dereferencing, variadics, etc are all
> just taking the code that people write and simplifying it, requiring
> developers to write less code to achieve the same result.
>
> Looking at PHP change through the "well it already works so..."
> approach is exactly the opposite of what should be done: make small,
> careful, reasonable improvements that help developers write less code
> so they can spend more time with their families or at the pub.

If only that was actually the case!

All the 'small, careful, reasonable improvements' that have been made so far 
have created a difficult to manage upgrade path from code that probably 
originated in PHP4 days and worked fine in PHP5 up as far as 5.2 but now 
requires open heart surgery to get it clean and capable in newer ones.
All right most of that code should probably be chucked on a bonfire, but it is 
running peoples live businesses now, and when the infrastructure changes and 
that stops working they are lost as far as fixing the problems!

For a long time I was quite happy simply to write code that was backwards 
compatible with PHP4 as that was what the bulk of ISP's provided even though I'd 
never used 4. Nowadays we are getting slated if we aren't using 5.5 when our 
clients can't even use PHP5.3 yet. And don't say "There is not a problem running 
old code as long as the server is configured right" ... there are enough holes 
that give a white screen and invariable at least one of them exists in the sites 
I still have to convert. And I'm converting to a platform that the rest of you 
have already abandoned for the next generation.

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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