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Comment by cute_boi | Hacker News Reader

I don't like such changes. Php 8 had a lot of breaking changes and upgrading it is already an arduous task. If I don't upgrade then package will demand php 8. If I don't upgrade package & language then I must stay alert of security vulnerabilities. And, changes like this makes relearning difficult. I wonder why majority of people in rfc voted "yes"

Thankfully I am investing in Rust language which has stability guarantee. In my opinion language shouldn't move fast. There should be balance. All those tutorials, guides become useless. There is a reason why COBOL is still used for 90%+ atm swipes.

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There should be the php equivalent of LTS (long term support). After such a long time on php 5.. it felt like one of the features of the language was stability. Your old code ran. 7 was much faster so easy sell to upgrade. the versions obsolescence treadmill has begun.. I like the language but having to upgrade this frequently (every couple years) is a bit much.

https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php

We should just stop messing with it. PHP is what it is, if you want something better/different build another HACK.

At this point the language works and works well. Everyone knows where the sharp edges are. The only people who are unhappy are the people who are forced into being PHP devs by $dayjob and would prefer a different language.

You mean being forced into being PHP devs by ${dayjob}... ;-)

slow clap

You are extremely mistaken. I love PHP and am quite happy with how it's evolving into a more concise and well defined language.

If you don't like it you are free to continue using an old version.

Expecting a language to stagnate because you don't like learning new things is asinine and doesn't hold water anywhere in the programming world except among the laziest of code monkeys.

> Php 8 had a lot of breaking changes and upgrading it is already an arduous task.

How so? I've upgraded most of my project to PHP 8 quite easily. Which versions were you running before, and what breaking changes did you see?

Not OP, but the only one that I know of and that can trip you up without giving any form of warning is the change of resources types to class types for some of the libraries, like curl.

Thus if your old code did a check like is_resource it will now return false instead of true.

> Thankfully I am investing in Rust language which has stability guarantee

For 25 years? Because that’s the timeline we’re talking about for PHP. There’s cruft after 25 years that should be cleaned out. Java is doing the same (but slower, and there’s less cruft).

You seriously think Rust or any language doesn’t need to change backwards compatibility for 25 years?

If you are using PhpStorm you can run a code analysis for a PHP version.

I did this on a large project made for PHP 7.2, including the vendor folder. The changes I had to make were minimal and were done within half an hour.

If this makes the language better, why not?

Can you tell me what in PHP 8 you're struggling with? Pretty much everything listed here has been deprecated for a long time or used by almost nobody: https://www.php.net/manual/en/migration80.incompatible.php

I've made my whole career about PHP and had no idea it supported stuff like (uncast).

In almost two decades of PHP programming, I can remember that I was 'forced' by a webhost to update my code only once. They went from PHP5 to PHP7 - if I recall correctly - and I had to change some MySQL function calls to MySQL PDO.

It was slightly more work than changing function calls, but if my code had been object oriented at that time, it would have cost me one hour max. Your mileage may vary for bigger code bases.

Edit: okay, make that two hours.

I see many aren't familiar with https://github.com/RectorPHP/Rector . It will help you with a bunch of PHP&frameworks migration work.

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