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Comment by orthecreedence | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice list of improvements. As someone who spends a lot of the day in PHP-land, this is going to make me happy. As someone who also controls our entire server stack, waiting for someone else to decide to upgrade will not be a problem :)

I'm glad the PHP devs are starting to actually make it a "real" language. It seems like PHP has always been the fat kid bumbling along behind everyone shouting "wait up guys!!" With closures in 5.3, syntax improvements and removal of horrible features (register_globals, magic_quotes, etc) in 5.4, it's shaping up quite nicely.

Thanks, PHP devs!

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> waiting for someone else to decide to upgrade will not be a problem :)

It is sad that a lot of servers are not like this, and PHP 5.4 will take ages to appear, if at all.

Heck, I know of a hosting company still using PHP4.

Funny, I just had to deploy an existing site to a PHP4-only hosting environment. After a few hours of re-writing things I've been taking for granted (a lot of timezone code namely) everything worked fine. But yuck, I felt dirty afterwards.

Hosting company that still uses PHP4? Name names so we can avoid and chastise them!

Media Temple for one. For a domain or subdomain you had to explicitly choose PHP5 instead of the default PHP4.

They actually changed this recently. The default is now PHP5, with an option to select PHP4.

It's not really sad, some administrators don't like immediately upgrading to the latest and greatest version. Anyone running Debian stable will probably not get 5.4 until 2013.

I've booted up my home server after ~7 months of down time that has virtualized distros. It was funny to watch Debian 5 aptitude safe-upgrade ending in ~2 mins with less than 15 packages and Gentoo emerge -udNav world being busy nearly all night. That just displays two radically different philosophies and I have nothing against either, though I prefer to be up to date and flexible.

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