Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:71517
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Received-SPF: pass (pb1.pair.com: domain gmail.com designates 209.85.128.177 as permitted sender)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Sender: julienpauli@gmail.com
In-Reply-To: <52E2924B.6080002@ajf.me>
References: <CADajX4AzUWh4-DALP_-fkpfPB+CMK4NvNJ2ByzmAUz2wGW8n4w@mail.gmail.com>
 <52E29253.2000801@lsces.co.uk> <52E2924B.6080002@ajf.me>
Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2014 17:31:35 +0100
Message-ID: <CAMUwpuS0KzwJWO=8Pfxdfwe8BuYPcPLHTrcB7ubfafXJ2020FQ@mail.gmail.com>
To: Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me>
Cc: Lester Caine <lester@lsces.co.uk>, PHP Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Ruminations on PHP 5++
From: jpauli@php.net (Julien Pauli)

On Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 5:18 PM, Andrea Faulds <ajf@ajf.me> wrote:
>
>
> On 24/01/14 16:18, Lester Caine wrote:
>>
>> Adam Harvey wrote:
>>>
>>> Adam, who loves starting a good flame war on a Friday.
>>
>> It would perhaps be nice to avoid the same mistakes that Python made
>> when re-factoring 3.0 and not taking the rest of the user base with
>> them. The level of breaking of BC needs to be carefully balanced?
>> And I still think that 5.4 should have been a major hike which would
>> have allowed a little more flexibility then.
>
>
> There is a lot that PHP's 5/6 transition can learn from Python's 2/3
> transition. One might be, IMO, not to backport any new features. Otherwise
> people will simply keep using 2/5 instead of 3/6, due to the features also
> being available there.

Big +1 , Python 2 to 3 should be taken care of when thinking about PHP5++.

Also, we should remember what we actually did from PHP4 to PHP5.
We changed the objects management (that was the biggest change), and
even with a compatibility mode INI settings which was pretty hard to
develop from an internal POV, it still took AGES for people to migrate
from 4 to 5, mainly because of "compatibility issues" regarding
objects, and because of the new error reporting system showing much
more messages on badly designed code in PHP5 than it did in PHP4.

I wasnt an internal guy at this time, but I still remember 2004 pain.
Everybody felt enthusiast , PHP 5.0 was a pretty nice product , but it
took about 5 to 7 years to finally jump to 5.X branch :-p
Times have changed, PHP and all its ecosystem is nowadays more mature
than before, but still...

We must not do any mistake for PHP6 , nobody will pardon a mistake.
Every wrong step or decision could lead to PHP's death , we really
have to take care of everything.

Julien