Re: Fix incorrect ternary '?' associativity for 7.0?

On 12/15/2014 2:11 PM, Stanislav Malyshev wrote:

There's not that many breaking changes accepted, and each of them had to be substantiated. "We had other breaking changes" is not a substantiation. For example, "most uses of associativity are wrong ones" - is, but that makes the idea of un-associating it even better, since unlike changing the associativity, it actually makes the problem obvious and easy to fix. Alternatively, of course, we could make a tool that detects this and alerts the user, but making it loud still sounds better. And the breakage we are discussing is not "trivial" - it's a logic change which makes code silently take different codepath without anybody knowing. In the world of BC breaks, this is one of the most evil ones. So we should avoid it as much as possible.

The justification for not making breaking changes always grows as a function amount-of-code-in-the-wild which could possibly be relying on bugs. This situation results in a permanent conclusion of 'better-never' in lieu of 'better-now-than-later'. In PHP-land, the implication then is that this gridlock cannot be resolved even by major versions (IMO, one of very few reasons for major versions to exist *at all*).

Usually the burden of proof lays on whoever proposes the change. Note that a lot of code is not public, especially for languages like PHP that is used for websites - meaning, there's little reason to publicize any code but reusable library code. And the fact that the change would not break a handful of popular libraries doesn't mean it won't break scores of websites whose source you can not see, but which are way more important for the people using them than some library they don't use. Yes, I understand that this means very high burden on somebody proposing BC-breaking change, and it makes the development more conservative. It is a high burden convince people that this change is worth the risk of breaking potentially unknown code with unknown consequences.

Without telemetry, there is obviously no way of *ever* asserting that something is ripe for removal or even deprecation. So this burden of proof is unmeetable by definition. -- Leon Sorokin