On Wednesday 18 July 2007 07:17am, Dave Smith wrote: > Wade Preston Shearer wrote: > > I completely agree. I personally think that the slow adoption rate is > > unacceptable. I think people are just being lazy. PHP five was > > released in 2004 and will no longer be supported at the end of this > > year. People need to pony and and just update their code. It's really > > frustrating, personally. > > I think lots of folks see all the work to move from PHP 4 to 5 and say, > "Hey, if I'm going to have to re-write half of my web application to > support PHP 5, I may as well move to another language that won't do that > to me later." The low adoption rate could be due to the fact that > projects are simply not adopting PHP 5 at all, but rather jumping ship > entirely.
I doubt that, given the surveys and all that (yeah, I know how reliable some statistics aren't). I think the major problem with adoption of PHP 5 isn't "addoption" but "migration". I think anyone coming to PHP after 5 came out is "adopting" PHP 5. On the other hand, most people with PHP 4 (and earlier) apps find that their code doesn't "just work" on PHP 5 and are *too lazy* to learn any correct programming practices. This is really the fundamental problem and one major flaw with PHP. I often summarize it like this: "One of the things that I like about PHP, and that I think is one of the largest contributing factors to it's overwhelming success in the world, is that it is a very approachable language. The thing I hate the most about PHP, and the reason why there is so much horrific PHP code out there, is that it is a very approachable language." The issue is that a large number of "PHP developers" never had any clue about how to program before they started playing with web pages. The next step was someone telling them, "Oh, PHP is really easy to use and learn; you should use that to add the current date to your home age, or to add a simple login wrapper/profile system for users." The next thing you know, it seems like 90% + of people writting code in PHP never learned how to program. Ug. Nearly every person I've ever talked to who dislikes PHP has told me that they don't like it because it "encourages" bad coding practices. It's a tough problem to solve. > Just a possibility. > > Having ported a 40,000 line app to PHP 5, and trying to still support > PHP 4 at the same time, I can say it's painful. Not > bash-your-teeth-out-with-a-rusty-iron-skillet painful, but painful. :) :) Well, I too have had to port some long apps from PHP 4 to 5 at times. Code written by others was not fun to port (especially if I had to maintain PHP 4 compatibility). Code that I had written was easy to port. Almost all the code I ever wrote for PHP 4 (since PHP 4.0.0) ran on PHP 5 with little to no modification (some ran, but still needed other love to make it do what I really wanted it to do, but that's another story). The major reason for this? I wrote object-oriented code using "proper", clean, well-commented, simple, organized, engineering (design it all, then code the parts) practices. Having good, well-formed code to start with made it *tons* easier to port. -- Lamont Peterson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Founder [ http://blog.OpenBrainstem.net/peregrine/ ] GPG Key fingerprint: 0E35 93C5 4249 49F0 EC7B 4DDD BE46 4732 6460 CCB5 ___ ____ _ _ / _ \ _ __ ___ _ __ | __ ) _ __ __ _(_)_ __ ___| |_ ___ _ __ ___ | | | | '_ \ / _ \ '_ \| _ \| '__/ _` | | '_ \/ __| __/ _ \ '_ ` _ \ | |_| | |_) | __/ | | | |_) | | | (_| | | | | \__ \ || __/ | | | | | \___/| .__/ \___|_| |_|____/|_| \__,_|_|_| |_|___/\__\___|_| |_| |_| |_| Intelligent Open Source Software Engineering [ http://www.OpenBrainstem.net/ ]
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