Re: About PHP6 ...

+1 on PHP 7.0. Sent from my mobile > On 2 באפר 2014, at 15:48, Eli <eli@eliw.com> wrote: > > Hello everyone. I've been hitting a lot of conferences recently, and > found myself having the same discussion with multiple members of the > community. And many of them have 'heavily encouraged me' to bring this > discussion up here. And Julien's recent PHP6 email, reminded me that I > hadn't done so. > > The short form is: > > We should not name the next version of PHP: PHP6, for 2 reasons: > 1. It will cause confusion in those least able to adapt > 2. It costs us nothing, hurts us in no way, to name it something else > > So let me get into some more details... > > Right now, unfortunately due to various issues that we won't go into. > There are a lot of books on the market, on shelves in bookstores here in > the US, and online, that talk about PHP6. A quick search for PHP6 on > Amazon, brings up 6 books in the first page of results alone. > > Yes, it sucks that this happened. Yes, it's stupid. Is it 'our' > (internals / core devs) fault? No. But the fact is that they exist, > and they are still out there. > > Now what is going to happen, when 'average jane PHP developer' out > there. Finds out that PHP6 is released. Or someone who is going to be > brand new to learning PHP, and wants to make sure they are learning the > latest version ... What happens when that person decides they should buy > a book to learn PHP6? They will go to their local bookstore, or they > will go onto Amazon.com. And they will search for PHP6 ... and they > will find all of these books. > > All of them being 100% completely incorrect. And not only useless to > these people, but actually damaging. Because these people relying on > the books to teach them what will be. Will think that they are being > taught proper PHP6. When it couldn't be further from the truth. (They > will be being taught PHP5.2-ish stuff, with unicode support that doesn't > exist). > > You might not think that people would be so easily deceived. I'm here > to say, that people will be. I'm amazed weekly, if not daily. How I > continue to run into people who have been programming PHP for ten > years. Who have never connected to the community. Who don't know about > any of the resources, people, community that exists out there. PHP runs > 80% of the web, and the 'community' that we always talk about, is > pitifully small in light of that. > > There are 10's to 100's of thousands of PHP developers across the world, > who may be relying completely upon non-community sources. And who will > be directly confused by the naming of this product PHP6. > > Is that 'our' fault? No, not at all. > > But should we care? Yes. I think we should. These exact same people, > are crucial to the ecosystem. We want to make it easy for people to > pick up the language new, easy for people to transition to the new > version. We want to make sure that if there is ANYTHING that we can do, > that might ease some confusion or pain points. We do so. In fact it's > why this group is SO adamant about not introducing non-backwards > compatible changes in minor releases. Because we don't want to impact > all of those millions of projects out there that people just need to work.. > > And the fact is. This is a problem that we can solve right here. Right > now. With ZERO impact on us. > > It costs us nothing, and doesn't hurt us, at all, to simply name this > next release something else. By simply changing the name, we suddenly > resolve all potential future confusion, not only confusion that we will > visibly see on twitter, message boards, email lists, etc. > > But we will be able to alleviate the hidden confusion that we won't see > either (and which in turn, could hurt adoption of PHP6 as well). > > And I'll state again - It costs us nothing to just put a different name > on this. > > It's for exactly these reasons - Why I would urge this group to name the > next release something else. Call it PHP7 - Or call it anything else > that you want to: PHP-X, PHP 2014, PHP-A, PHP Leaping Leopard. That > part doesn't matter. What does matter is calling it something else, so > that confusion doesn't occur. > > Thank you for your time, > Eli > > -- > | Eli White | http://eliw.com/ | Twitter: EliW | > >