Wade Preston Shearer wrote:
*shrugs* Most of what I code nowadays is PHP5, but I don't see how it
matters one way or the other. Am I missing something? Does it hurt
the community to have my code running a generation behind?
I think it does, yes. If no one is updating their code and progressing
forward then the hosts don't update the versions they install on their
servers… and if the servers don't have the new version then people are
not motivated to write using the new features… and the cycle hinders
progress.
I agree with Wade. The general PHP user base has told web-hosting
providers that they don't want PHP5, and refuse to update their code to
even run on PHP5. PHP5 has been out for 3 years. During that time at
an ISP I worked at, there was only 2 customers that asked about PHP5.
Compare that to the one customer that still had PHP3 code, and the
hundreds of customers that have clearly stated they will refuse to
upgrade. This loud voice of opposition to PHP5 is what keeps it from
getting anywhere.
However, most of these customers that have voiced their opinion were
*not* developers. They were cheap business people that thought it was a
waste of money to pay their developers more for "no good reason".
This makes me tend to think the blame is not on the PHP community, but
that it is just a normal consequence of PHP's ubiquity. Or perhaps the
blame should fall to the PHP developers of the world that don't educate
their bosses on the costs of code maintenance. Or perhaps the common
use of PHP consultants that do one-off websites and either go out of
business, or are never heard from again.
The ruby community is still in it's infancy compared to PHP's adoption
level. That combined with the average Ruby user being savvy enough to
educate their boss on new technologies as well as code maintenance. Or
perhaps the ruby-on-rails explosion has yet to reach the point where
code maintenance is so important.
The old saying "Don't fix it unless it's broke" doesn't apply to
programming, because the refusal to fix it will eventually *cause* it to
break.
--lonnie
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