On Upgrading to PHP5
Vid had a post yesterday where he writes about his concerns regarding the push to upgrade to PHP5. If you have not heard already, the PHP developers announced a couple of weeks ago they will be discontinuing support for PHP4. The reaction to this has been mixed, and I was perplexed at the developers who seem to be against the change. While most of the applications already work for PHP5, they just don’t understand the point of forcing people to upgrade.
Vid is correct on many accounts. End users don’t care what the back end is doing. Many coders don’t care about the enhancements to PHP5, they just want their code to work. If it’s already working, why mess with it now? For me personally, when I started working with the new XML library, I was blown away on the amount of progress that had been made. Working with the old version was like pulling teeth, the new version was cake. Now if I had a program already working with the old XML library, would I want to re-write the whole thing just for PHP5? Probably not.
The statemeant “PHP5 gives cleaner, faster code” is pointless. Only good practice can give you cleaner and faster code, there are still going to be a million and one idiots out there writing bad code.
However, I believe a lot of people are missing one main point - one program is easier to maintain than two. PHP has a limited number of developers working on their engine. If they can stop support for PHP4, that leaves more people free to fix bugs in PHP5 and put effort towards PHP6. Seems like forcing people to upgrade is a small price to pay.