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In-Reply-To: <533C0713.9070106@eliw.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] About PHP6 ...
From: xfsgpr@hotmail.com (Good Guy)

On 02/04/2014 13:48, Eli 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
>

Frankly it is daft idea to outsmart authors of PHP books just because 
they decided to write about PHP6.  We need them as much as they need us 
and it helps no one to out-maneuver them just for the sake of it.

The numbering system should continue as it is so that we don't alienate 
users of PHP.  Why do you guys want to confuse them bu inventing yet 
another system?

Simplicity is the key to success of a product and it should be carried 
on.  The only time we should jump one number is when #13 is reached.  
Apart from that the numbering system should remain as it is.



-- 
Good Guy
Website: http://mytaxsite.co.uk
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