[UPHPU] PHP 4 EOL Announcement

[Lamont Peterson]

On Wednesday 18 July 2007 07:17am, Dave Smith wrote:
> Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
> > I completely agree. I personally think that the slow adoption rate is
> > unacceptable. I think people are just being lazy. PHP five was
> > released in 2004 and will no longer be supported at the end of this
> > year. People need to pony and and just update their code. It's really
> > frustrating, personally.
>
> I think lots of folks see all the work to move from PHP 4 to 5 and say,
> "Hey, if I'm going to have to re-write half of my web application to
> support PHP 5, I may as well move to another language that won't do that
> to me later." The low adoption rate could be due to the fact that
> projects are simply not adopting PHP 5 at all, but rather jumping ship
> entirely.

I doubt that, given the surveys and all that (yeah, I know how reliable some 
statistics aren't).  I think the major problem with adoption of PHP 5 
isn't "addoption" but "migration".  I think anyone coming to PHP after 5 came 
out is "adopting" PHP 5.  On the other hand, most people with PHP 4 (and 
earlier) apps find that their code doesn't "just work" on PHP 5 and are *too 
lazy* to learn any correct programming practices.

This is really the fundamental problem and one major flaw with PHP.  I often 
summarize it like this:

"One of the things that I like about PHP, and that I think is one of the 
largest contributing factors to it's overwhelming success in the world, is 
that it is a very approachable language.  The thing I hate the most about 
PHP, and the reason why there is so much horrific PHP code out there, is that 
it is a very approachable language."

The issue is that a large number of "PHP developers" never had any clue about 
how to program before they started playing with web pages.  The next step was 
someone telling them, "Oh, PHP is really easy to use and learn; you should 
use that to add the current date to your home age, or to add a simple login 
wrapper/profile system for users."  The next thing you know, it seems like 
90% + of people writting code in PHP never learned how to program.  Ug.

Nearly every person I've ever talked to who dislikes PHP has told me that they 
don't like it because it "encourages" bad coding practices.

It's a tough problem to solve.

> Just a possibility.
>
> Having ported a 40,000 line app to PHP 5, and trying to still support
> PHP 4 at the same time, I can say it's painful. Not
> bash-your-teeth-out-with-a-rusty-iron-skillet painful, but painful. :)

:)  Well, I too have had to port some long apps from PHP 4 to 5 at times.  
Code written by others was not fun to port (especially if I had to maintain 
PHP 4 compatibility).  Code that I had written was easy to port.  Almost all 
the code I ever wrote for PHP 4 (since PHP 4.0.0) ran on PHP 5 with little to 
no modification (some ran, but still needed other love to make it do what I 
really wanted it to do, but that's another story).  The major reason for 
this?  I wrote object-oriented code using "proper", clean, well-commented, 
simple, organized, engineering (design it all, then code the parts) 
practices.  Having good, well-formed code to start with made it *tons* easier 
to port.
-- 
Lamont Peterson <peregrine at OpenBrainstem.net>
Founder [ http://blog.OpenBrainstem.net/peregrine/ ]
GPG Key fingerprint: 0E35 93C5 4249 49F0 EC7B  4DDD BE46 4732 6460 CCB5
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