What happened to PHP 6?

McGlockenshire · on Dec 23, 2014

Here's a slide deck postmortem: http://www.slideshare.net/andreizm/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...

tl;dr: They made some bad decisions about Unicode and everyone got burned out.

They skipped 6 because 7 contains none of the Unicode changes and didn't want to confuse people.

michaelchisari · on Dec 23, 2014

It was a no-go. There was a lot of difficulties in getting it out the door, so I'm guessing they're pushing on with PHP7 to get rid of any social/political baggage that comes with the 6 release.

jmspring · on Dec 23, 2014

Were there cascading problems to word press, Drupal, etc?

leeoniya · on Dec 23, 2014

the non-unicode bits slated for 6.0 got rolled into 5.4, which was a pretty messy release given the extreme conservatism they adhere to even for major version changes.

Tegran · on Dec 23, 2014

If you do a Google search for "PHP6 Book" you'll see why they had to rename it:

https://www.google.com/#q=php6+book

Basically a lot of authors thought they'd get 'ahead of the game' and publish PHP6 books very early. If a 'real' PHP6 was released now, there would be confusion.

aikah · on Dec 23, 2014

Politics. It should have been called PHP6. But to "avoid confusion" they skipped that number,which of course leads to more confusion.

alphonse23 · on Dec 23, 2014

This was exactly what I was going to ask.... reading these comments makes me dislike php even more...

brvs · on Dec 23, 2014

It's out being almost as successful as Perl6 and Python3 :-)

e: Actually wasn't there a blog post posted to HN suggesting Perl skip to 7 too?

esaym · on Dec 23, 2014

Indeed:

http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2013/02/perl-7.html

http://www.slideshare.net/andy.sh/perl7-light

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_8bjsimLsk

eCa · on Dec 23, 2014

The suggestion was that a future release of Perl5 should be named Perl7. Perl6 is a "spunky little sister"[1] to Perl5, not the next evolution of Perl.

[1] http://perl6.org