intertwingly

If you’re suggesting I contribute to the PHP project via code, that’s a fair point, and I wish I had more time and skills to be able to do so. In general I think their overall direction is good, as evidenced by the sentence after the one you quoted: “PHP 6 sounds much more compelling.”

What I think is missing is an understanding of what made PHP 4 such a killer update to 3, where 5 didn’t compel as many people. I also think there is a deeper discussion around language usability from a casual web coder’s point of view. As this comment say there can be a decreasing marginal utility. Every language doesn’t have to do everything. That’s what I was hoping to get people talking about, and it worked.

Even that comment suggests that people who aren’t in a position to contribute to the PHP project via code will “eventually be dragged into the upgrade kicking and screaming”.

Those that contribute to PHP apparently feel the most pain concerning support of multiple versions.  Yes, you can argue that they brought this upon themselves; but it is worth noting that at this point you are along for the ride.  When I’m in similar circumstances, I tend to consider the karma implications of cursing the driver.

In any case, some people who are along for the ride with WordPress happened to cross my path yesterday.  Perhaps you are in a position where you can help them.  To my eyes, I see a bug that was reported on WordPress 2.1, and the milestone on that defect is currently set to 2.3.  Hopefully the users affected won’t have a tendency to kick, or scream, or rant too much.

“Hopefully the users affected won’t have a tendency to kick, or scream, or rant too much” - Sam Ruby schooling Matt...

So they discontinue support for an old version, with more than a year of notice, and the world goes on. I don’t think innovation on the web has been hampered by the limitations of PHP 4, and I don’t think it’s going to be helped by the new versions. The biggest challenges we face are rarely constrained by choice in programming language.

As for the CDATA bug, it looks like some decent code is on the ticket now, and it’s small enough to go into a minor point release. Why did the bug sit there so long? I just scanned 153,009 recent posts on WordPress.com and none of them had any CDATA strings. I don’t have a numerator so I can’t guess how rare it is, and I’m sure the guy running into it doesn’t care that he’s an edge case, but he is and those bugs can sometimes linger. The blank category one you emailed me a few weeks ago was fixed within hours.

“Approximately eight years ago I submitted an outline of an approach to integrate PHP4 with Java. The response was...'here is your CVS account'. This fundamentally changed my notion of us and them.” - Sam, on PHP...

Matt Mullenweg has been critical of the PHP core team for abandoning PHP 4. Sam Ruby calls him out and says with open source projects there is no “Us” versus “Them” since you can freely join “Them” whenever you...

Matt Mullenweg: PHP core has never shown any particular regard for its biggest apps, as evidenced by the above bug and others, so I’m not sure why we should go out of our way to promote their upgrade. [emphasis added] Approximately eight years ago...