[bavell]

Same here, started off with PHP around a decade ago and couldn't wait to move to another server-side language. Nowadays it's much nicer to work with (as long as you avoid the warts) and PHP 8 looks to deliver another slew of welcome upgrades.

Only downside is that there does seem to be quite a lot of (non-trivial) deprecations which is understandable but I wonder how long it'll take for 8 to percolate into production...

[nolok]

Every single deprecation is a wart being removed, none of them are a python 2->3 kind of issue (it worked just fine but now I need to work to move it to the new stuff !), and it's all easily fixable in your code with minimal effort (but decent amount of time ... if you've not bothered to clean up warnings for the past decades).

The cases that are not replacable easily are things that should never have been written ever.