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Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2016 08:59:33 -0000
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC Proposal] var keyword deprecation/removal
From: TonyMarston@hotmail.com ("Tony Marston")

"Lester Caine"  wrote in message news:56DAE00F.2030203@lsces.co.uk...
>
>On 05/03/16 11:26, Fleshgrinder wrote:
>> PHP being a mess is still one of the most quoted arguments against PHP!
>>
>>> > Only if it results in an actual and measurable improvement. Changes
>>> > for
>>> > "purity" or "consistency" do NOT fall into this category.
>
>> This is your believe and you know that many people disagrees with you on
>> this; you just commented on the "[RFC] Deprecations for PHP 7.1" thread
>> and we have much more of those RFCs and threads.
>
>There are a number of schools of thought, one will say 'You don't have
>to update your perfectly functional code', just use a version of PHP
>that it will run on, so over 40% of users are 'stuck' with Php5.2/3
>either because they don't have the support to change or the need to
>change. Much of that code was written by people who are no longer
>involved or interested and so unless others pick up the baton, there
>will be little progress. I still run 5.2 on sites simply because it's
>simply uneconomic to change them.

Well said. Anybody who says "the majority of users don't use this feature,
so that's a good enough reason to remove it" are ignoring the vast amount of
code out there that will be affected.

>Now moving code forward, handling every warning and simply keeping code
>running from version to version, one hits the problem that sites that
>are reliant on older versions of PHP can't easily be run with newer
>versions. I've managed to build a way around that problem by now running
>php-fpm/nginx which allows me to actually run the same code across
>multiple versions of PHP. But one has to be very careful about just what
>is changed at each step, so in my book, unless there is some good
>security reason to stop something working then it should remain for BC
>reasons.

Hear hear!

>Others are of the opinion that all current PHP code is a mess and my
>reaction to that is ... well use a different language then! ...

I echo that thought. Millions of developers chose to use PHP because it gets
the job done, and once they have written coder that works they expect it to
keep working with future versions of the language. This is called
"longevity", and all organisations expect their investment in software to
last for a significant amount of time. If their application has to be
recoded every couple of years they will regard the language as being
"unstable" and move on to something else. I have worked with two other
languages for over a decade each, and as these languages were maintained by
"professionals" they could guarantee that code written on day 1 of the first
year would still be running ten years later.

>expecting the vast majority of users to rename every function ( on of
>the proposals for PHP7 ) or switch to a strictly typed method of working
>is simply not going to happen, so I have no problem with people adding
>new extensions which allow these different sytles of working as long as
>the underlying procedural style of working is maintained in as BC a way
>as possible, so things like 'var' and a number of the 7.1 deprecation
>proposals simply destroy BC with little gain to a pure OO based version
>of PHP anyway.

All those who want to work with a 100% pure OO language should stop using
PHP and switch to Java. Stop complaining about the quirks in PHP because
there are quirks in every language. Stop trying to make the language perfect
as your definition of "perfect" does not match that used by others who are
more than satisfied with "good enough".

-- 
Tony Marston