zlacker

>>TimWol+(OP)
As someone who has written in past a lot of PHP and Python, I find it interesting that PHP devs can do a lot of breaking changes, and don't get a huge amount of flak for it.

Python 2 -> 3 change really was painful for Python community, but PHP does these almost fundamental breaking changes so often, that maybe people just get used to it? I haven't really followed Python past version 2, but I think they are less likely to ever do such amount of breaking changes.

There must be a lot of unmaintained PHP codebases that will break if PHP is updated by hosting provider etc. Someone must be pulling a lot of hairs because of this.

Edit: Those dogpiling there, I rest my case with josefresco's comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33907628

It's painful. Dropping dynamic properties? That will be a lot of fun. WordPress is probably biggest segment for PHP usage.

>>Cianti+R7
PHP learned the lessons of the Python 2/3 transition and is making backwards compatibility breaks much more carefully. “fundamental breaking changes […] often” seems like an exaggeration to me.

PHP 7 made a few big and necessary changes but they generally did not affect well-written code much. Python 3 broke a lot of things without good justifications, and without a way to make your code compatible with Python 2 at the same time.