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PHP 8.5

(stitcher.io)
215 points brentroose | 1 comments | 20 Nov 25 06:07 UTC | HN request time: 0.293s | source
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darkamaul ◴[20 Nov 25 09:16 UTC] No.45990664[source]▶
PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.

I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

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1. danaris ◴[20 Nov 25 15:34 UTC] No.45993687[source]▶
I dunno; I started with PHP 5 (actually, I think I started in late PHP 4), and I've only been happy with the changes as it's evolved.

The only one that's caused me any significant stress is the deprecation of the old `mysql` DB interface; I had to refactor a whole bunch of code for that, since I'm maintaining a codebase that's been in continuous use & development since 2001.

The additions to PHP since 5 add more things you can do, but they don't really change the simple things you can do to first learn PHP. You can still just create a .php file and start interspersing HTML and <?php script tags with basic operations.