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.

>>TazeTS+c8
I remember one breaking syntax change in PHP 7 a larger project was affected and it was tested with grep and fixed with sed in a matter of minutes.

There is benefit if you have the project under test and can run the build with different php versions thought. Best in parallel so you have current, next and future. It perhaps becomes the norm since the yearly release cycle but always was a requirement when supporting different php versions.