I am a big fan of Joel Spolsky articles, not long ago i read one of his “Strategy Letters” and realised why there will be no revolution in PHP ever. This topic is quite interesting because a lot of PHP programmers and developers would like PHP development team to completely rebuild it – meaning that there should be no backwards compatibility whatsoever.
And i agree that would be nice but PHP6 team simply cannot do it. Making PHP6 completely incompatible with PHP5, would cause only troubles – mainly for Zend. First of all hosting companies would never switch to PHP6, because they have to many clients who are not PHP programmers, but have PHP5 and even PHP4 applications running. More over these people do not care about the code, design patterns or even security! They just want their applications to run smoothly without troubles.
Next, there are so many applications: freeware, open source and commercials, that the only thing to start any kind of website is to buy hosting and get software that would be do what you want it to. But, it would not be the case if next PHP version would incompatible with older PHP version. There would be almost no software available.
In the end the only group that would be happy with that switch would be PHP programmers who would get new tools and would be able to build better and more advanced applications. However i am not marketing guru or big CEO so that’s just my opinion on how things look like – maybe completely wrong.
12 Comments on "Why there won’t be revolution in PHP6"
If they need to absolutely launch php6 let them go ahead with all those changes but always please make it backward compatible atleast with php5
Chris
I personally think that if php was re-written from the ground up (even if it wasn’t backwards compatible) to have more performance it wouldn’t be so bad. The only thing they would need to do is offer that version alongside another backwards-compatible one until they could phase it out.
*scratches head*
I respect Joel’s articles and this article brings to mind something else he wrote about throwing out old code in one of his books. I forget which.
BUT
I only need to point out Python 3, and Ruby 2.0 implementations and to a lesser extent the massive refactoring efforts for the various Rails 1.x and 2.x branches.
Nacht – I don’t think Python or even Rails are a good comparison to PHP. Those environments are used mainly by programmers while PHP has a much larger “app from a box” install base.
Jordan’s suggestion, that PHP5&6 could be installed side by side for as long as necessary would be great. I know of at least a couple of hosts that did this with 4&5.
Unfortunately I don’t think that’s going to happen. The vast majority of hosts hung on to PHP4 and only PHP4 pretty much until the developers declared it dead. PHP5 having been stable for quite some time and PHP6 already in the works didn’t seem to phase them. And this was with an upgrade where most people’s apps continued to work unmodified!
I don’t think we can have a revolutionary change (at least in one step) simply because most hosts suck. However, look at the changes PHP has already made throughout it’s versions. There already is a revolution. It’s just happening in steps.
Let the time come to you.
Let PHP6 be different from previous versions and let be no compatibility. What I want is speed. PHP6 should be running at Java speeds.
Thanks
I say give us a 10-year phasing out period from 5 & 6 to 7. That should hopefully give most of us time to port our applications.
PHP is an amateurs’s tool.
We’ve to please amateurs.
So, let’s keep the past’s crap in.
The only thing they would need to do is offer that version alongside another backwards-compatible one until they could phase it out
they would absolutely need to keep a backwards-compatible version for the foreseeable future. there is so much code out there, not just on websites but on server software too, that would need to be changed. I agree with matt, though think they might as well call it another language with a different extension (instead of .php) too not to confuse things.
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