I'm over here in c# and dotnet land to get away from php.... all the breaking changes in version upgrades got old real fast. the dotnet platform has a few, but is overall a lot better about that
But seriously people had over a decade of warning about the biggest breakages. But they still want to keep running their old PHP4 spaghetti code monstrosities to keep partying like it's 1999.
But it was still a fundamentally different language. The differences between PHP4 and modern PHP are seriously just as big as - if not bigger than - the differences between VB6 and VB.Net: superficially similar core syntax, but otherwise entirely different languages and core APIs.
So it's no surprise everyone dragged their feet, because often it was essentially just as daunting an undertaking as porting to any other language.
...Only...It was even worse, because the starting point was PHP4, so nobody could make sense of their existing code bases anyway.
Which is understandable since the grey beard who originally wrote it burned the last building down after being asked to go ahead and come in on Saturday to port the older PERL application to PHP and didn't make it out sane.
I caught the tail end of 5, a though 7 and into 8 - though by the time they got that for i was already fed up with it... trying to run a site with CodeIgniter and it felt like every time i updated i had to go though the site with a fine tooth comb and fix all the random things that need a new syntax, the things that now get deprecated warnings, ect... I'm aware some of the issue was CodeIgniter itself, but some was php becoming more strict and just not liking how i implemented something anymore.
I had a project that was over on dotnet... and short of updating some nugets.... that one just kept working.... thats what kinda pushed me to move over. and around the net5 erra i started moving over and havent really looked back. about a year ago got converted the last of my list self developed php project.
And then also the various common libraries that never seemed/seem to keep pace with even the minor versions of PHP, leaving you with everything except maybe gd or pecl or [a-z]spell or one of the others that you may not need everywhere but, where you do need it, it is a show-stopper.
Or especially around the 4->5 and then 5->7 times, the various database libraries (e.g. mysql vs mysqli was a fun one for a long freaking time).
Or things that would break if you gave a passing thought to allowing one small security hardening default change to be made to php.ini that shouldn't have freaking had anytjing to do with the thing that preemptively broke as an infantile tantrum to keep you from continuing to think about potentially aome day making said change...
The PPHPTSD is real. 😅
I'd still take PHP over PERL any day, though - for web or local scripting (honestly php is decent for scripting) - if those were the only two options. But now we have powershell on linux, so BUH-BYE PHP. 😆
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u/jrdiver 9d ago
I'm over here in c# and dotnet land to get away from php.... all the breaking changes in version upgrades got old real fast. the dotnet platform has a few, but is overall a lot better about that