On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Zeev Suraski wrote: ... You know what, I agree. I wrote something to that effect in my post from a few minutes ago. The vast userbase is mostly comprised of people we hardly even get to see.
Sorry to chime in on this already long thread with my -negative- commit karma, but I really want to show support for the extremely sensible and considerate position of Zeev. I tend to consider myself a not-so-average php user, not because of my self-assessed superior coding skills, but because most of my (ex)coworkers, both developers and sysadmins involved in web applications, have zero interest in any of the php mailing lists, conferences or similar. They need to get a job done, have very limited resources for it and absolutely no time at all to improve their knowledge. They use php because 1-it's easy, 2-other ppl use it. They can read english, but with some difficulties, so their main source of information is blogs from the italian php community. They might keep running applications on PHP 4.04 (pl1!!!) because the original coder left the project years ago, and doing proper QA on an application you have not written is a huge effort, and migration a risk they cannot really even asses. Now, I can sneer at them all I want, the fact remains that they are part of the user base, and have no less rights than I do to get the best solution that can be served to them. And I do not think mindless BC breakage is a thing they like. imho, a lesson to be learned from the slow transition to php5 is to really focus on communication. The big changes were written on the walls, but many small ones were not. And QA is needed almost exclusively to catch the small ones (for the big ones, you have the coder fix it upfront). Some examples of things I stumbled upon include: objects not being copied on assignment (it was really documented, in the cabinet after the 'beware of the leopard' sign), *curl_version suddenly returning an array instead of a string and others... Of course most users will migrate only when they feel the need for it anyway, but the more obstacles are put on their path, the slower the adoption rate will be. Keeping the 'unicode off' switch is a kind of double edged word: it eases life for people developing for intranets (they can migrate to php 6 with unicode off and be fine), but might backfire on framework/library developers, that will have to code for two environments... Maybe the only solution is making it easier to run different versions of php in parallel? my .2euros Gaetano *
