Re: Future stability of PHP?

On 10.04.23 01:44, Deleu wrote:

Over the course of PHP 7 and 8, there were significant concerns on how problematic PHP deprecations and breaking changes were. Now we're starting to see the result of such concerns being ignored. This isn't the first time someone mentions on PHP internals that it's getting harder and harder to stay with PHP, but it's never really received with an open mind. It's either "you don't have to run deprecation-free code" or "you've had years to get rid of that deprecation error, tough luck if you didn't". I love PHP and I built my career around it. I have zero interest in starting from scratch in another language, but I've lost count on how many projects, friends and companies around me have already made the switch to Typescript. It's getting harder and harder to argue in favour of staying with PHP.

The PHP ecosystem even just in the last 10 years has changed completely, with composer, more mature frameworks, easily usable independent components and even static analyzers. For me that ecosystem is the big value proposition of PHP, in addition to a good standard library. Typescript has a completely different value proposition, and the language itself is usually not the deciding factor, as there is so much more to it. Only through the deprecations and the type system does PHP even offer some similar features as Typescript - like type checks and the possibility of a static analyzer. If all these changes would not have happened, people likely would argue even more that they had to switch to Typescript, because of the missing type safety in PHP. Nowadays there are even tools now like Rector that can help you automatically upgrade your codebase - that is also a new value proposition. My projects were affected by all the new warnings, deprecations etc. over the years, but I found countless bugs because of those (and many bad choices - is count($string) really what I wanted?). The language warning you when you are likely doing something with little sense is a huge value proposition - otherwise why are people using Typescript instead of Javascript? It would be interesting to know why some people are having such huge problems upgrading their applications, as I think those would often be good stories with something to learn in them. So to the original poster or other people with big problems when upgrading, writing a blog article detailing what happened would be helpful to evaluate if the PHP project could improve something, or even why something broke. And just as a sidenote: I never have more things breaking than when trying to upgrade a JS/TS-project, because of changes in NodeJS, because of slight breaks in dependencies, etc. To me that clearly works better in PHP, but experiences can differ.