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PHP 4 End of Life Announcement
perbert writes "The PHP development team has announced that support for PHP 4 will continue until the end of this year only. After 2007-12-31 there will be no more releases of PHP 4.4. Critical security fixes will be made available on a case-by-case basis until 2008-08-08. For documentation on migration for PHP 4 to PHP 5, there is a migration guide. There is additional information available in the PHP 5.0 to PHP 5.1 and PHP 5.1 to PHP 5.2 migration guides as well."
Agreed - on TFA I was hoping to see the 'PHP4 to Python' migration guide
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Ok, lots of people hate PHP, and I can see it is ugly and encourages insecure practices. But why is so much of the most popular software for the web written in it? Consider:
CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, e107, XOOPS, various thngs with "Nuke" in their name, Geeklog...
Blog engines: Wordpress, Textpattern, Nucleus, b2evo, Serendipity..
Wiki: MediaWiki, Dokuwiki, PmWiki,...
Forums: PHPBB, Simple Machines Forums, punBB,....
Those lists could be a lot longer, I have not even listed everything I use or might use (I am trying CMS Made Simple at the moment, for example).
If PHP was so bad, surely there would be better software written in other languages would walk all over it. When I look around for software to run a site on, most of the top few choices are written in PHP. Why?
It is not hosting: there is plenty of cheap hosting for Perl, Python and, increasingly, Ruby. Even Windows and ".Net" hosting is not too expensive these days.
It is not buzz and mindshare either: Ruby has that.
It is not the existing base of software: Perl has that.
OK there is plenty of good software in other languages, but ugly, boring PHP seems to be doing very well.