On 10/10/2019 20:59, Walter Parker wrote:
They will either be stuck on an old version of PHP or have to pay to update the code.
If you're getting stuck on a island after being given 4 or 5 years
warning that the bridge to it will be closed, after being pointed to the
ferry, given free tickets to that ferry, and being told it will continue
to run long after, that's your own fault.
This pushes the
costs on them to solve a an existing issue that 20 years after it was
created and is now an issue because a new generation of coders, unaware of
history, find the existing syntax not to there taste/a poor design.
History does not mean it was a good idea at the time, and even if it
was, that doesn't mean it's a good idea now. Times move on. Your
argument could easily be reversed...
An old generation of coders, stuck in their ways, inflexible, preferring
what they know rather than changing with the times for the greater good.
Why are
we giving priority to people that haven't taken the time to educate
themselves over people that did and used programming style that used to
common?
We're assuming that in a general purpose programming languages, most
programmers expect a function call to look like a function call, and not
a string.
We're assuming that people don't just go from never having touched PHP,
to expert level, knowing all its quirks and secrets, within a few hours.
We're assuming that there's a heck of a lot more to stewardship of the
language than backwards compatibility.
So let's look at it from the perspective of what we can do...
We can either a) Find a way to reach out to every PHP programmer in the
world and let them know that there's these special operators that look
like a string, but actually aren't, and they do something that can be
really dangerous, and they'll probably never see it but god help them if
it's there and they miss it.
or
b) We add one line of code and warn people that we're eventually going
to remove a rarely used and poorly understood syntax, and people should
at some point in the next 4 or 5 migrate to the much more obvious
shell_exec.
By writing the RFC, it's pretty obvious which one I think is the best
and most realistic course of action.
Mark Randall
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