[ra]

Having not used php for 12 years, I recently accepted a freelance job for a client who had been left in the lurch by his php developer who seemingly abandoned the project because she was out of her depth.

I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by some of the new language features that php has borrowed from elsewhere... eg: closures, anonymous functions, docstrings.

IMHO php is held back primarily by messy, inconsistent documentation and extremely ugly parts of the core library that are also riddled with inconsistencies that should have been deprecated years ago.

Not that I would consider starting a new project in php - I just love programming too much for that; but I believe php will evolve, benefiting from other languages.

Really, it needs it's own "Python 3" (out with the old, smarten up the new).

[Bloodwine]

Major PHP versions are the evolutionary jumps for the language. They don't tend to worry as much about backwards-compatibility when going from PHP3 to PHP4 to PHP5. I've read that PHP6 was supposed to take it further and outright remove a lot of deprecated and insecure aspects of the language, but I don't know if or when PHP6 will be released.

I agree that they should take things even further and really clean up the language before releasing the next major version. Fix the needle-haystack vs. haystack-needle inconsistencies, function naming conventions, and so forth.

The adoption rate of a new major version on shared hosting providers is relatively slow, so it'd be a perfect time to really shake things up and clean it up.

[eropple]

I would suggest that minor PHP versions often are, too. Significant internal changes between 5.x versions have caused some code to break (and other code to act very differently than it was originally intended to).

[_ikke_]

Note that python3 still doesn't have widespread adoption, because there are still widely used libraries lacking support for it.

[spdy]

But in the coming future it will. All major libraries and frameworks are going to port over to python 3.

But we are missing the point here. PHP could need a cleanup from the ground up even if they have to break a lot of stuff this could help the language to evolve.

[dextorious]

"But in the coming future it will. All major libraries and frameworks are going to port over to python 3."

Don't bet on it. It has been too many a years already, and no dice (or minimal dice)

[ra]

This was a big topic of discussion at PyconAU this year.

Having listened to several Python core developers as well as core developers of some major web frameworks and libraries, I have no doubt that Python 3 will replace Python 2.

I think the key tipping point will be when the major web frameworks support it.

[dextorious]

The big one is Django, and the whole port is a mess. There's some minimal work but it's like it hasn't even been started.

The official party line on the delay was the lack of a WSGI spec for P3, but there has already been one for several months now.