PHP is a perfect example of how to undergo major transitions correctly.

In the time that it took Python to go from Python 2 to 3, PHP underwent 5.2 -> 5.3 and 5.6 -> 7.0. 5.3 changed how you write PHP in a fundamental way by introducing namespaces and PSR0 autoloading. Then, 5.6 -> 7.0 cleaned up the parser, resulting in massive speed improvements.

They did this by not breaking the universe in these major updates...or really, any of there updates. Each update would break a few specific things, warn you about a few other things that were going to break in the near future, while giving you ways to shim the old behavior if you _really_ needed it.

They also gave you ample carrots reasons to update - aside from what was already mentioned, my personal favorite update was PHP 5.4 because it introduced short array syntax, made UTF-8 the default charset, introduced traits, and finally put register globals and magic quotes out of their misery...but giving you a shim if you had some ancient project that needed it.

If you're wondering why PHP 6 was abandoned, it was because it was an update in the style of Python 3 by breaking strings everywhere. In retrospect, I think the decision to cancel 6 was the right one. Somehow, I doubt that PHP would've had the influx of data science and AI that saved Python 3.

Hats off to the project - I've long been off of the CGI-style web development narcotic, but the language put food on my table for quite some time, and the people steering the language treated their community well.

> They did this by not breaking the universe in these major updates

I don't think the amount of breakage per se was the problem with Python 3. I think the problem was that for a long time (until u"" strings in 3.3? four years after 3.0?) there was ~no way for a library to support both 2 and 3 in a single codebase. That meant that each project had to either maintain a fork, or do a "flag day" migration, which in practice meant you couldn't migrate until all your dependencies were migrated. Big mistake in retrospect.

> I don't think the amount of breakage per se was the problem with Python 3.

The lack of u"" is just another manifestation of the complete breakage they wrought upon Python's string handling, isn't it?

It was closer to a decade (3.7) till they'd put enough of the bits they'd ripped out back in for Py3 to be suitable for the things I used Py2 for.

I've seen a few other comments also talk about PHP becoming more complex. However, I have "simple" code built using 5.3 and it works perfectly fine in 8. So I guess it CAN be complex, but doesn't really need to be. The biggest changes I would make to that code are fixing the multiple 'switch' and 'if/else' blocks to an anonymous function or some mapping... but it's not required.

This is true. As long as only one person interacts with the code, all languages can be simple. C++ can be simple.

But once multiple people are involved and I have to read someone else's code, then I really start to appreciate languages with less features. There are some language I love to write code in, like Ruby or Haskell, where I feel like a damn genius when I write it, but want to pull my hair out when I have to read someone else's code.

> 23 years ago we created some encryption software for it

ZEND?

I remember "nulling" software in the mid-00's and Zend was always a terrible ball-ache.

Which, if that was your project, is high praise. :)

I think PHP 8 is easy to understand if you write it from scratch, you just have to learn doing things the right way, read up on PSRs and so on. It is a bit more complex but much more secure and supports quite a lot of things now that are definitely helpful to have.