> -----Original Message----- > From: Tom Worster [mailto:f...@thefsb.org] > Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2016 4:24 PM > To: Rick Widmer <vch...@developersdesk.com>; internals@lists.php.net > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Improving PHP's type system > > On 4/19/16 7:21 PM, Rick Widmer wrote: > > Are too many of these incompatible shiny things, too fast, the main > > reason so many PHP users are on older versions? > > > > IMHO, yes. > > This would mean, by an large, that people had tried a more recent version of > PHP and found that their code was incompatible. I think on the contrary that > they haven't tried because they have little motive. A lot of running apps are > in > maintenance mode with no significant investments in new code, without > which it's easier to take the attitude that it's not broken so don't mess > around > with it.
It's more complicated than that - people don't actually have to try and upgrade in order to know (or think they know) that they'll have to invest time and efforts in getting their code to run on a new version. They guess as much. That said, I don't think the issue with shiny new things is that they introduce incompatibilities. They rarely do - I think the biggest source of incompatibilities we have is removal of deprecated features and not introduction of new ones. Shiny new features have other issues - increased cognitive burden, increased code complexity, etc. - but typically introduction of incompatibilities is not one of them. However, we can learn that the attractiveness of new features in PHP is not very high - or we'd see much faster adoption of new versions (which also leads me to believe that we're spending too much effort on the wrong things). I think we're going to see much faster adoption of 7.0 - but in my experience at least, it's predominantly the increased performance and reduced memory consumption that gets people excited - the new features are secondary if they play any role at the decision. Zeev
