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Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2014 13:44:50 -0700
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To: Eli <eli@eliw.com>, Kalle Sommer Nielsen <kalle@php.net>
Cc: Internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] About PHP6 ...
From: me@mikestowe.com (Michael Stowe)

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Nikita makes a valid point about not having any PHP 7 books out there and
people jumping to the PHP 6 books right away.. I think regardless of how
this is done there has to be an educational push to help people realize
that many materials on PHP 6 are NOT about the real PHP 6.

On the flip side, I see another danger, and that is people grabbing these
PHP 6 books and presenting on materials based on them to prepare their
teams/ user groups/ etc for PHP 6... thus spreading the misinformation-
whereas I do not think developers would be as prone to do the same if it
was called PHP 7.

Unfortunately, while many more experienced users with PHP would write 1
star reviews, you will have quite a few programmers who are not privy to
these conversations getting lost, confused, and complaining that PHP 6 just
doesn't work.  I think you'll see greater misinformation, less conversion
from new users, and more support tickets/ filed bugs with the PHP 6
approach.

Unfortunately, any way you slice/ dice this it sucks.  But the fact is that
the PHP 6 books out there now are extremely misleading and are not up to
PHP 5.3 snuff (let alone traits and generators), and regardless of what
action we take we're going to run into issues with this.  I think the
question is how do we mitigate the risk and make the upgrade as easy and
painless as possible for everyone involved.


On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Nikita Popov <nikita.ppv@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 10:09 PM, Eli <eli@eliw.com> wrote:
>
> >  On 4/2/14, 3:50 PM, Kalle Sommer Nielsen wrote:
> >
> >  and since PHP6 was due many years ago, I doubt many of those books still
> > are in print and how many books could there be around still, I get that
> > someone would feel angry over buying a book about features available in a
> > non existing version, but that should be on the authors behalf, not ours
> > while I realise this will hurt us a little
> >
> >
> > Kalle, thanks for responding.  I believe however you missed the part in
> my
> > original message where I pointed out that in fact a large number of these
> > books are still in print.  And no 'campaign' from us is going to stop a
> > publisher from continuing to sell a book they've already invested in,
> which
> > costs them nothing to continue to sell.
> >
> > And once other books are out, they will sit equally.
> >
>
> They will not sit equally. If someone buys a PHP 6 book and finds out that
> half the code in there doesn't actually work on PHP 6, it's going to get a
> 1 star review on Amazon and the issue takes care of itself.
>
> Also, I have some doubts that calling this release PHP 7 will be any
> significant help with the issue: Assume that we call it PHP 7 and it was
> just released. There are no books about it yet. So if someone looks for a
> current PHP book and there's nothing about PHP 7, then what's he going to
> buy? The next closest thing, namely a PHP 6 book. Nice, we're back at the
> same problem, just with messed up versioning.
>
> The PHP 7 name could only show benefits in the long term, to distinguish
> from the old books. However, as already said, at that point we're back at
> the reviews ;) Presumably a newer book about the actually released PHP 6
> version would have higher ratings (unless its crap, of course).
>
> TL;DR I don't think this is a big issue in the first place, but even
> assuming that it is, the usual review system should take care of it by
> itself. Also calling it PHP 7 won't really solve the problem anyways.
>
> Nikita
>



-- 
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"My command is this: Love each other as I
have loved you."                         John 15:12

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