[alexandernst]

First of all, it really shouldn't take any brain cycles to figure out that problems were caused by an 'automated upgrade from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.2' (who does that anyways, and why?).

Second, it's almost 2020. Why there still isn't a better way to debug PHP than using die()?

And third, "mysqli" has been the defacto method for SQLing, while "mysql"was deprecated years ago.

I'm not sure why this is even in HN.

[krick]

What do you mean "there still isn't a better way"?! There are plenty debugging tools, many with integrated support in most IDEs. But, honestly, the only time I needed them was to figure out the place for performance optimization, var_dump() + die() are really perfect to debug anything. In fact, I feel that the nature of PHP being "fresh start on every call" + no compilation needed makes it probably the easiest to debug language out there I know.

[smacktoward]

Let me introduce you to XDebug: https://xdebug.org

You can thank me later :-D

[edoceo]

And it plugs into your favorite editor too! (Eg: Atom, VSCode, etc), it's super awesome!