IMHO, we should try to fix PHP's version numbering based on others'
problems.
When people try to outsmart others, they may also suffer on consequences of
things not going the way they plan/want.
+1 on PHP6.
On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 11:07 AM, Mike Stowe <[email protected]> wrote:
> I vote for PHP-One as a tribute to the xBox 720 ;)
>
> In all seriousness, as much as it sucks I have to agree with Eli, PHP 6 is
> misleading due to the amount of misinformation out there. However, I'm not
> sure that changing the versioning of PHP would be beneficial either (it's
> pretty quick and easy to know if you're up to date by hearing PHP 5.5 vs
> PHP 5.2. If people want to avoid confusion I would recommend just jumping
> to version 7.
>
> Just my two cents.
>
> Happy almost Friday everyone!
>
> - Mike
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> > On Apr 2, 2014, at 5:48 AM, Eli <[email protected]> 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
> > |
> >
> >
>
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Guilherme Blanco
MSN: [email protected]
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Toronto - ON/Canada