For once, there was an interesting read on the Wordpress dashboard (one that doesn't involve Lorelle needing a parking space in SF, or some random site that has switched from something to Wordpress).
Matt Mullenweg, of Wordpress fame, has posted a reaction to the PHP 4 end of life announcement. Starting his posting with some general harassment of the php.net site (missing permalinks, rss1.0 feeds) he goes on to explain how PHP 4 still dominates the hosting field, and that PHP 5 adoptation has been slow.
So far so good, it's all correct. But, why has PHP 5 adoptation been slow? Has it been due to faults in PHP 5 simply because people haven't dared developing for PHP 5 only simply since the vast majority of PHP installs are still on the 4.x revisions? The people behind PHP wanted to push it to the next level by releasing the 5.x series, but to keep compatibility with most apps the 4.x series was continued until now. So, does that mean that PHP 5 is a flawed and failing product as Matt claims? NO, it means that the PHP team has had to keep focus on two separate branches of development while trying to bring PHP to the next level in the 5.x series.
Matt then goes on slamming the GoPHP5.org site as the "world’s ugliest advocacy site", and that it's being run by "some misguided app makers". I'm sorry Matt, but the last little bit of respect I had for you as a developer has now finally worn off. Not that you should care, but this really is one of the things that makes my urge to jump off the Wordpress bandwagon even stronger than before.
Now the PHP core team seems to have decided that the boost their failing product needs is to kill off their successful one instead of asking the hard questions: What was it that made PHP 4 so successful?
Ok, what made PHP 4 successful? Was it PHP 4 or the apps that runs on it? I wonder... The logic here is pretty darn simple, you can make the worlds best programming language, but if no-one uses it is it truly the best? It might be, in theory, but as long as it's not used by anyone no-one cares. So, yes, PHP 4 has been a great success mainly because people has made some great apps based on it. Wordpress would definitely be one of the most successful ones at that. Thats also why I'm very disappointed to see that an application that has greatly helped spur interest in PHP based solutions has developers that seems to be uninterested in helping the framework that enabled their success forward.
Can anyone say Chicken. Egg. Omelet?
It's not like PHP 5 requires you do to OOP, if you don't want to. Wordpress itself runs fine on PHP 5, so I don't really see how the EOL announcement for PHP 4.x is such a big blow?
For those of us who read the wordpress-hackers mailing list it comes as no surprise that Matt is not a big fan of PHP 5, and he is of course entitled to his opinion however misguided it might be at any give time.
Finally, I want to direct a big fat thank-you to "Johan Delinger", who's comment on Matts posting sounds like a voice of reason for once.
Added: This trac ticket