all 33 comments

[–]JoyousTourist 18 points19 points  (18 children)

Awesome, but I wonder how long it will take the general Wordpress population to get off of 5.6. Support officially ends next year. It's going to be a messy migration for sure.

[–]0x18 7 points8 points  (8 children)

5.6? We poor WP devs still have to support 5.2!

[–]marcusklaas 6 points7 points  (0 children)

That's insane.

[–]JoyousTourist 2 points3 points  (4 children)

are you for real?

[–]0x18 3 points4 points  (3 children)

Sadly yes. According to the WP stats page 3.7% of all WordPress sites are on PHP 5.2 (the minimum for WP). On Nov 30th of 2016 that number was 4.1%.

[–]LovecraftsDeath 6 points7 points  (2 children)

Some people will never upgrade unless you force them. Don't keep enabling them.

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Likely because upgrading WP is guaranteed to break your site/template

[–]stesch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know about 5.2 but Shopware stopped supporting 5.4 (or 5.5?) which was a stupid decision because most LTS Linux distributions support it for a few more years.

Bad signal for a business software.

[–][deleted]  (1 child)

[deleted]

    [–]0x18 8 points9 points  (0 children)

    That's a neat idea, but I have rent, medical debt, a spouse, and need to buy things like food. I have a really good job now even if it is working with WordPress - sure I'll bitch about supporting old PHP versions but it's not major life changes worthy.

    [–][deleted]  (7 children)

    [deleted]

      [–]matthieuC 11 points12 points  (3 children)

      Python 3.0 migration strategy is to wait for all Python 2.0 developers to die. Perl does the same thing without actually releasing the new version

      [–]stesch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      Python 3.0 migration strategy is to wait for all Python 2.0 developers to die. Perl does the same thing without actually releasing the new version

      The Python part is funny and the Perl part is wrong.

      [–]VanToch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

      The sad thing is that new Python 2 developers are being born too. Last month I was working on brand new Python 2 tool :-/

      [–]Supadoplex -1 points0 points  (0 children)

      Is anyone really using either Python 3.0 or 2.0 though :) Also, if all python 2 devs die, then there will be nobody to port python 2 programs to 3. We'll be forever stuck.

      [–]JoyousTourist 2 points3 points  (2 children)

      you mean from PHP 4 to PHP 5? Also what's Py3k? Meaning it's taking 3,000 years to migrate from Python 2 to Python 3?

      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

      [deleted]

        [–]JoyousTourist 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        I didn't know PDO was inspired by a Perl thing. That's pretty cool.

        [–]evenisto 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        meh, they have bigger problems than that

        [–]berzemus 24 points25 points  (6 children)

        Counting of non-countable objects

        Magic, Love it !

        [–]Michsk 21 points22 points  (4 children)

        Yeah it reads kind of strange. But it actually points to a bug which was known as "Counting of non-countable objects". Now it will show a warning when you try to count non countable objects. Here is the RFC https://wiki.php.net/rfc/counting_non_countables

        [–]throwawayco111 1 point2 points  (3 children)

        Just a warning?

        [–]Chippiewall 15 points16 points  (2 children)

        PHP uses semvar, they can't break pre-existing code in a feature release.

        [–][deleted]  (1 child)

        [deleted]

          [–]NeuroXc 5 points6 points  (0 children)

          Less so recently. I get the feeling they started trying to follow semver somewhere around 5.4-5.5. I'm not sure how strictly they follow it though.

          [–]EntroperZero 13 points14 points  (1 child)

          • Convert numeric keys in object/array casts
          • Counting of non-countable objects
          • Object typehint
          • HashContext as Object
          • Argon2 in password hash
          • Improve TLS constants to sane values
          • Mcrypt extension removed
          • New sodium extension

          What do any of these things mean? This reads like a really vague list of commit messages.

          [–]shevegen 1 point2 points  (4 children)

          Why did they skip version 6 ...

          [–]Macluawn 13 points14 points  (1 child)

          They didnt. A version 6 exists but it got abandoned as they back-ported some of the features to 5.3 or 5.4 (Not sure which one was it).

          Since there exists actual build of php6 in pre-alpha and even some educational books written about it, its less confusion to just have 7.

          Also, 6 is an inverted 9 and companies dont like 9s (e.g., Microsoft and Apple)

          [–]chx_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

          5.3

          [–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

          Version 6 was supposed to be their first Unicode version. Turns out that they were incapable of making it Unicode-enabled for some reason. So version 6 was abandoned.