Kris, I'd love to break BC a lot and fix things, but it would seriously slow adoption. Fixing *bugs* has stopped people upgrading, imagine how they would react to non-bugs being changed. On Jul 18, 2012 7:21 PM, "Kris Craig" <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jul 18, 2012 at 7:27 AM, Andrew Faulds <[email protected]>wrote: > >> To avoid BC breaks we should try to avoid major syntax changes. > > > Again, why should we be worrying so much about BC breaks on a major > version increment? BC breakage is just a fact of life whenever a major > version of anything comes out. Because you can't have major improvements > without it, I would classify it as a necessary evil. > > Don't we have a deprecation policy already worked out for this sort of > thing? If we can throw an E_DEPRECATED, then do that; otherwise, I'd say > just make the change and document it very clearly. People are going to be > reluctant to switch to a new major version anyway; there are still a lo t > of people who use PHP 4. There's already an expectation that there will be > significant BC breaks. I think we're just shooting ourselves in the foot > if we keep trying to run away from that. It's either that or we let the > language stagnate indefinitely. > > If it's better, people will adopt. It'll just take time and convincing, > but that's also just something that comes with the territory I think. > > --Kris > >
