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To: Levi Morrison <levim@php.net>
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Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2015 23:43:32 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: [RFC] Reserving More Types in PHP 7
From: johannes@schlueters.de (Johannes =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Schl=FCter?=)

Hi,

On Mon, 2015-04-27 at 09:50 -0600, Levi Morrison wrote:
> This was known at voting time, yes.

and I hope voters understand what they are doing while voting and hope
they considered that. As long as we have this voting scheme we have to
follow the results else it's pointless.

> The number of code bases using a string class is quite small when you
> compare it to the total number of PHP developers and code bases out
> there.
> 
> I think you are blowing this out of proportion because you are
> directly affected by it. I get it -- my website at work was really hit
> hard in PHP 5, 5.3 and 5.4. We had some really crappy code that relied
> on register globals, some deprecated session functions, magic quotes,
> ext/mysql and other problems. After fixing each issue our codebase has
> been better off.

It is true that evolving is useful to improve code bases. But mind: On a
private code bases that is simpler to do than with a system like
Wordpress with it's APIs and downstream consumers. If Wordpress is not
willing to update it probably won't work with PHP 7. Thus hosting
companies, distributors etc. keep PHP 5, which means Wordpress has no
motivation to update, which means hosting companies and distributors
won't. The old circle ... and see Python 2 vs 3 for the longterm effect.
That's why I think BC is very important and like the quote
"Compatibility is a feature" (Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++)

johannes