[artyom]

I agree, as I was one of them. Rightfully so, because PHP 20 years ago was the prime example of a complete disaster. Not just occasionally, there were long years of incompatibility, missing implementations, incoherent errors, security issues, fragmentation, etc.

Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6 (after coming from PHP 4). I think it became a more sane ecosystem around very late 7.x to 8.

I won't touch PHP ever again, but I'm glad (no irony) that they finally were able to pull it off. There were some good ideas there, then they quickly became victims of their own success.

Nowadays, there's places (Amazon) where PHP is just forbidden at a company-wide level (not joking) because of their early, long-standing reputation of being a mess. Or places where they just gave up and re-implemented their own PHP (Meta). I don't see that changing any time soon.

[moebrowne]

> Paid my share of dealing with those problems with PHP 5 and 6

Hard to take this seriously when there was no PHP 6.

https://ma.ttias.be/php6-missing-version-number/

[artyom]

Correct.

If you were there, you'd remember the UTF8/Unicode fiasco (how long it took, how many people was both relying and struggling with it, and how they needed to cover it up after even some hosting providers attempted a beta upgrade and had to roll it back).

There was a PHP 6 (I'm including the non-updates in PHP 5 "waiting" for it), they just had to rewrite history as of PR damage control back then. That's what the article you linked describes, pretty much.