[nolok]

To this day, old PHP 4 objects code still works in the lastest PHP version

The difficulty of upgrade for PHP didn't come from the devs having to redo / revalidate parts of their code for little to no immediate benefit (like in Python's case) but in the shared hosting companies (un)willingness to make the upgrade when the scripts their users wanted (phpbb, wordpress, ...) worked fine with PHP 4.

And that's why these various projects agreed to a common date of "end of support" for PHP 4, sending a message to hosting companies to either upgrade, or not be able to deploy wordpress and co anymore

[ma2rten]

I know of a small company (won't publicly shame them) that to this day is actively developing a php 4 code base. The reason is that they use a couple of libraries which do not work in php 5 and don't have the time/manpower to port it.

[mscarborough]

Do you know what libraries can't be ported without a lot of effort? I haven't heard that in a long time.

[pearjuice]

Automattic isn't a small company.

[scribu]

Automattic is running PHP 5.4 on their servers, I believe: https://github.com/Automattic/prefork

[nolok]

He was trying to take a cheap jab at wordpress