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 does these almost fundamental breaking changes so often, that maybe people just get used to it?

PHP also cares a great deal about backwards compatibility. There are long deprecation phases before anything gets removed.

The RFC system also helps a lot in ensuring that changes to the language are well thought out to and discussed beforehand. The is not much change just for change's sake. Churn is kept to a minimal while still allowing the language to evolve.

> 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.

PHP upgrades are also good money for agencies. Got to earn that bread.

And to let out a dirty secret, for really hopeless projects there is the option to keep them on life-support by running them inside a docker container with an older PHP version. (Horrible but if that's what the customer wants, it's their risk.)