4get-me-not

4Get-Me-not

So PHP.org has announced that they are no longer supporting version 4 of PHP. Ordinarily, this would be a non-issue, like saying that Microsoft wasn't supporting Windows 3.1, but the fact is, the migration from php 4 to php 5 was never as painless as the owners of the language would like to make you think.

There are many factors for this including

• Global variables that are not by default supported by 5.0, but are used as the central core of most 4-based applications
• a system of referencing that changed significantly between version 4 and 5, causing innumerable bugs and warnings.
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration5.incompatible.php documents many other differences that are blown off as "insignificant" by the owners of the language.

You get what you pay for

It is understandable that a company that puts out a free open source language can act with impudence when upgrading their language. After all their primary motivation is to make the language cooler than it was and not turn into an infernal hidebound mess like Java or C.

And it is true that while they aren't supporting 4, it really is not relevant because 4 supports itself, for those who don't want to make the leap. However I find the arrogance with which they whitewash the issue of whether there are conversion issues at all frightening. For example, and I am quoting from the PHP documentation itself, they issue blithe statements like "Most existing PHP 4 code should be ready to run without changes," which really highlights the arrogance which they express towards the mess they made.

I have talked with a PHP person at a Sugar CRM conference and he bluntly repeated the party line that the differences were insignificant and converting from 4 to 5 was painless no matter how much evidence I poured forth that such was not the case. When they are willing to tell developers to their face and in person that the problems they experience in converting to 5 are nonexistent (in effect, we are simply making the whole thing up, I guess or maybe we are "bad developers"?), it should not be surprising that they express the same sentiment in writing.

I would like to point out that I am not left on the shore with the dinosaurs: I've been using php 5.0 insistently for years and make heavy use of its improvements. But I also understand that any developer leaves behind a huge legacy of work that he expects to run under the predominant environment -- and many companies couldn't even find their old developers if they wanted to to ensure that their work converts healthily when they upgrade their server. So there is a lot of companies who are forced to stick on the version of PHP which a product was created under, and to fail to support them is a slap in the face to people who spent years developing applications, such as Mambo, which were finished long before php 5.0 came along in the first place.

So please, PHP, do not force people to choose between which version of PHP they use and most definitely do not punish the people whose legacy of software cannot make the conversion to php 5 (or 6, the version soon to come out.) It is not the companies fault, and its not the developers fault, that a lot of people depend on php 4.0 to run their business. One example, and a big one: C:NET, one of the biggest electronic entertainment and review sites, is still dependent on php 4.0, and it's not because they are stupid or lazy. Take another one, there are jillions of sites based on Mambo that have been forged over the years, many of them maintained by semiskilled and nonskilled content managers, that cannot be expected to play ball with the advancement of the language.

These are the people who have made PHP a success. Please continue to support them, and assume they have good and reasoned cause to stick to the verison of PHP that they have chosen.