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Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 20:39:32 +0300
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To: Eli <eli@eliw.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] About PHP6 ...
From: zeev@zend.com (Zeev Suraski)

+1 on PHP 7.0.

Sent from my mobile

> On 2 =D7=91=D7=90=D7=A4=D7=A8 2014, at 15:48, Eli <eli@eliw.com> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone.  I've been hitting a lot of conferences recently, and
> found myself having the same discussion with multiple members of the
> community.  And many of them have 'heavily encouraged me' to bring this
> discussion up here.  And Julien's recent PHP6 email, reminded me that I
> hadn't done so.
>
> The short form is:
>
> We should not name the next version of PHP: PHP6, for 2 reasons:
>    1. It will cause confusion in those least able to adapt
>    2. It costs us nothing, hurts us in no way, to name it something else
>
> So let me get into some more details...
>
> Right now, unfortunately due to various issues that we won't go into.
> There are a lot of books on the market, on shelves in bookstores here in
> the US, and online, that talk about PHP6.  A quick search for PHP6 on
> Amazon, brings up 6 books in the first page of results alone.
>
> Yes, it sucks that this happened.  Yes, it's stupid.  Is it 'our'
> (internals / core devs) fault?  No.  But the fact is that they exist,
> and they are still out there.
>
> Now what is going to happen, when 'average jane PHP developer' out
> there.  Finds out that PHP6 is released.  Or someone who is going to be
> brand new to learning PHP, and wants to make sure they are learning the
> latest version ... What happens when that person decides they should buy
> a book to learn PHP6?  They will go to their local bookstore, or they
> will go onto Amazon.com.  And they will search for PHP6 ... and they
> will find all of these books.
>
> All of them being 100% completely incorrect.  And not only useless to
> these people, but actually damaging.  Because these people relying on
> the books to teach them what will be.  Will think that they are being
> taught proper PHP6.  When it couldn't be further from the truth.  (They
> will be being taught PHP5.2-ish stuff, with unicode support that doesn't
> exist).
>
> You might not think that people would be so easily deceived.  I'm here
> to say, that people will be.  I'm amazed weekly, if not daily.  How I
> continue to run into people who have been programming PHP for ten
> years.  Who have never connected to the community.  Who don't know about
> any of the resources, people, community that exists out there.  PHP runs
> 80% of the web, and the 'community' that we always talk about, is
> pitifully small in light of that.
>
> There are 10's to 100's of thousands of PHP developers across the world,
> who may be relying completely upon non-community sources.  And who will
> be directly confused by the naming of this product PHP6.
>
> Is that 'our' fault?  No, not at all.
>
> But should we care?  Yes.  I think we should.   These exact same people,
> are crucial to the ecosystem.  We want to make it easy for people to
> pick up the language new, easy for people to transition to the new
> version.  We want to make sure that if there is ANYTHING that we can do,
> that might ease some confusion or pain points.  We do so.   In fact it's
> why this group is SO adamant about not introducing non-backwards
> compatible changes in minor releases.  Because we don't want to impact
> all of those millions of projects out there that people just need to work=
.
>
> And the fact is.  This is a problem that we can solve right here.  Right
> now.  With ZERO impact on us.
>
> It costs us nothing, and doesn't hurt us, at all, to simply name this
> next release something else.   By simply changing the name, we suddenly
> resolve all potential future confusion, not only confusion that we will
> visibly see on twitter, message boards, email lists, etc.
>
> But we will be able to alleviate the hidden confusion that we won't see
> either (and which in turn, could hurt adoption of PHP6 as well).
>
> And I'll state again - It costs us nothing to just put a different name
> on this.
>
> It's for exactly these reasons - Why I would urge this group to name the
> next release something else.  Call it PHP7 - Or call it anything else
> that you want to: PHP-X, PHP 2014, PHP-A, PHP Leaping Leopard.  That
> part doesn't matter.  What does matter is calling it something else, so
> that confusion doesn't occur.
>
> Thank you for your time,
> Eli
>
> --
> |   Eli White   |   http://eliw.com/   |   Twitter: EliW   |
>
>