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
I don't think PHP's introduced anything quite as disruptive, for example, as introducing bytes vs strings. Where no tool can really convert existing code.

>>tyingq+Di
Well there once was such an idea. That what would have become PHP 6. But then there was the decision to not do that, keep strings binary only and never release PHP 6. Instead we had seen a couple more PHP 5.x releases and the yearly release cycle was introduced (with 5.6 having extended community support [plus one more year]).