This site provides a nice overview, cool. It makes me wonder though, because IMHO PHP is adding too much new features that are often somewhat half-baked. What would be better is to have an actual specification to improve the core language. IIRC, Python gradually adds features where they are opt-in first (from __future__ import foo).
I'd gladly take a language which offers stability and gradual improvement over a language that just keeps adding new toys to play with. The software development cycle can take many years and from my experience, changes in the language or runtime are a burden.
But my biggest gripe isn't with PHP, it's that cheap web hosting still comes with PHP and MySQL. And I honestly can't blame them.
I am working on a ~10 year old PHP project, the amount of changes that needed to be made in the last decade because of the changes in the language are almost non-existent.
But using new features is nice and makes the code better, there are even projects (rectorphp) that can automate using of new features in the existing codebase.
The only time I've ever had to update legacy code due to a breaking change in PHP is when an old encryption algorithm was withdrawn and I had to write a migration to decrypt and re-encrypt the data we'd originally encrypted with it. Apart from that (and a few notices sent to Sentry) it's been smooth sailing over the years.
upgraded a large badly written php 5.6 codebase to 7.1 then 7.4 and then 8.0. first jump took about 3 days of work to iron out issues then going to 7.4 and 8.0 was even quicker. using the php compatibility checker helped a lot.
I'd gladly take a language which offers stability and gradual improvement over a language that just keeps adding new toys to play with. The software development cycle can take many years and from my experience, changes in the language or runtime are a burden.
But my biggest gripe isn't with PHP, it's that cheap web hosting still comes with PHP and MySQL. And I honestly can't blame them.
/rant