PHP 5.2.0 Released

ShaunC writes "The PHP Group and Zend have released PHP 5.2.0, and upgrades are encouraged. The 5.2.0 update offers several security fixes, including patches for a couple recently announced buffer overflows in input parsing. This release also includes a number of library upgrades, bug fixes, and default bundling of the popular JSON extension to help with AJAX development. See the full changelog for more details."

Comments

Argh.

[Balinares]

Urbanradar,

Your comment pisses me off, but there's something I want to say all the same: I think you are, essentially, right. Whatever one's woes with PHP might be, they don't justify trolling and unsubstantiated mouthing off. Besides, "toy language" is a purely inflammatory statement that doesn't even have any factual content.

However.

However, the implicit underlying assumption I think I perceive in your comment -- that PHP criticism must be trolling -- annoys me a lot. Please allow me to expand on this.

You see, one constant characteristic of the Internet in general is the noise. Look here on Slashdot: do you read all the comments on any given story?

The noise is a bigger problem than you'd think. The noise means that it's hard to get heard. It means that to be heard, unless you're a remarkable writer (which I, and most people, aren't), you have to exaggerate your message. "PHP is a toy language" is one such exaggeration; and perhaps even actually worthy of being modded up if followed with factual information to support it. And much likelier to catch a moderator's attention with its use of strong language.

Which you would, undoubtedly, consider a troll all the same, wouldn't you?

As you can probably guess by now, I have crates of such information against PHP. (In my defense, I do try hard to gather evidence against my own tools of choice as well, for two reasons. One, being aware of their own idiosyncrasies allows me to work better with them. Two, it's a simple matter of intellectual honesty.)

The vagaries of life have landed me into a managerial-ish position in a small company that develops and hosts large-scale PHP websites. My responsibility here is twofold: ensuring that the sites work, and ensuring that they keep working.

I didn't know PHP before joining this company; I had a generally positive opinion of it beforehand, from reading Slashdot. So I got to discover it through that new role.

Let us just say, to put it mildly, that my opinion of PHP has quickly become very poor.

I think that managing a language's design and development is one of those jobs that's freaking damn hard. It takes a LOT of experience, critical thinking, introspection, knowing to prioritize issues, knowing to tap into the decades of experience in language design to understand what works and what doesn't, why, and in what context. And different people with different backgrounds and objectives are more or less successful with it.

And I don't feel the people behind PHP -- I'm sorry, guys, I don't know how to put it nicely... -- are doing the best possible job of it.

More precisely, my primary issue with PHP is its culture as a project. Cultures are inherently difficult to describe, but if I had to put it in a few words, I'd call it the "Works for me" culture.

Simply put, the sort of attitude that PHP seems to encourage -- by which I mean, the shortest-path-to-arrival approach to doing most things in PHP -- work fine for the developper producing the code, but are formally broken in a way that WILL come back to bite the ass of whomever poor dude is in charge of keeping the thing working.

For instance: I understand PHP uses a function based on the tolower() C call to make method calls case insensitive, and leaves it at it. It works for them, doesn't it? Except that in the real world, it breaks. Deploying PHP sites on servers that use a Turkish locale yields blank pages. The workaround is to never use that particular locale. Easy, isn't it? No, it isn't: PHP's gettext functions for dynamic translation require the locale to be set appropriately (unlike that of other languages). And I have my Turkish clients on the phone a lot.

Until recently, before the introduction of PDO, the canonical native way of addressing databases was to use PHP functions named after the database itself (mysql_*, etc, making the process of migrating databases, or creating a site that may have to be deployed client-side on varying database backends, an utte