Philip Sturgeon wrote:
On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Lester Caine <les...@lsces.co.uk> wrote:
Terence Copestake wrote:
There's a conflict between people who want to keep PHP
simple and accessible and people who want to make PHP into a professional
programming tool/environment, complete with all bells and whistles.
You see that is part of the problem here. What proportion of the internet is
powered by the current and older versions of PHP? What is 'so wrong' that
it's not already a 'professional tool'? I've been using PHP since just
before PHP5 was finalised and I don't find anything wrong with the code I
produce using it, and I am making 'professional' websites and services for
'professionals'.
There is nothing "so wrong" that it is not already a professional
tool, obviously, but it can certainly be improved. Adding short array
syntax, short-ternary, array dereferencing, variadics, etc are all
just taking the code that people write and simplifying it, requiring
developers to write less code to achieve the same result.
Looking at PHP change through the "well it already works so..."
approach is exactly the opposite of what should be done: make small,
careful, reasonable improvements that help developers write less code
so they can spend more time with their families or at the pub.
If only that was actually the case!
All the 'small, careful, reasonable improvements' that have been made so far
have created a difficult to manage upgrade path from code that probably
originated in PHP4 days and worked fine in PHP5 up as far as 5.2 but now
requires open heart surgery to get it clean and capable in newer ones.
All right most of that code should probably be chucked on a bonfire, but it is
running peoples live businesses now, and when the infrastructure changes and
that stops working they are lost as far as fixing the problems!
For a long time I was quite happy simply to write code that was backwards
compatible with PHP4 as that was what the bulk of ISP's provided even though I'd
never used 4. Nowadays we are getting slated if we aren't using 5.5 when our
clients can't even use PHP5.3 yet. And don't say "There is not a problem running
old code as long as the server is configured right" ... there are enough holes
that give a white screen and invariable at least one of them exists in the sites
I still have to convert. And I'm converting to a platform that the rest of you
have already abandoned for the next generation.
--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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