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PHP 6 and What to Expect
An anonymous reader writes "Jero has a few interesting thoughts on what PHP 6 is driving towards and provides a nice overview of what has been keeping the PHP team busy lately. For more specifics, PHP.net also has the developers meeting minutes from last November available with a great recap of all the major issues on their platter."
I wonder if most of the new features in PHP 6 will even appeal to most users. I started on PHP 4 with O'Reilly's Programming PHP and when PHP 5 came along, I didn't notice anything that was really missing. It's like Perl 6, there are already plenty of people who feel that what they have so far serves their needs, and there's not anything to improve upon.
phpBB, vBulletin, mysqladmin, postnuke, phpDiplomacy (shameless self promotion), etc, etc; none will work until they've been ported to the new PHP5 OO model, and once they've been ported they won't work on PHP4.
They should leave in backwards compatibility for the class based OO model which <PHP5 uses. Once they bring out PHP6, PHP5 will be the only version which runs new and legacy PHP scripts, so PHP5 will clearly become the standard for a long time.
I'm a big fan of PHP, but with so many apps (e.g. my university's timetabling app) still in PHP3, all the rest in PHP4, both becoming obsolete, changes to the API, even changes to what's allowed within the same version; I'm starting to wonder if I should have focused on a more stable language like python or perl instead.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Too true. Declaration of variables, and local variables in blocks, is what keeps preventing me from making stupid mistakes in Perl.
bash$
I have yet to see a major web host that offers Python Server Pages support which just so happens to be a standard feature of mod_python. The single biggest reason why PHP is so popular is that it is a free alternative to ASP with a modestly lower learning curve. Not to troll, but I'd like to make a bet here. If web hosts made inline Python, Ruby and Perl modules like mod_python availible to their users, few people would choose PHP over those three. The hardcore would choose Perl Server Pages, the uber-geeks would choose Ruby Server Pages and the rest would, rationally, choose Python Server Pages.