PHP 7

I've been reading up on the new features in PHP 7. Being a PHP developer, it's important to keep up on stuff like this.

Reading through the list of changes to PHP, I've become aware of some features that I don't normally use in the course of web development. PHP has so many features that it's possible to write applications in a wide variety of styles with this language.

Namespaces come to mind, for example. Using my own code libraries, I typically don't need to use namespaces but it's certainly a nice feature to have. A lot of how it works reminds me of Flash Actionscript 3.0 (which is a flavor of ECMAscript if I recall correctly). Also, it's derived from Hypercard - which is a VERY old school system that I learned all the way back in High School! We actually had a Hypercard class; it was fun. Of course, that was less programming and more multimedia... kind of a precursor to web development, in a way.

Hmm. That was quite a tangent. Anyway, PHP7 has a lot of changes in regard to objects. I'm not sure it's as much of a leap as PHP4 was to PHP5 in that department but it's still significant.

I'm kind of surprised you're not going in the direction of something like Node.js or C#. Although... lots of sites still use PHP. It's got a bad reputation among programmers, despite that.

(Not that I want to start a flame war, of course)

On Saturday, October 15th, 2016 at 12:44 am, Wolfwood29 said:

Really? I never got that impression. PHP is heavily used across the Internet.

As for PHP 7, I was skimming over some of the new features. It continues to evolve.

As long as WordPress sites exist, yeah, PHP's probably sticking around.

I see more and more Node.js and React stuff though. The main thing is not relying on a LAMP stack or similar combination of server-side software and having something that can just spin up its own web server for the sake of easier configuration.

I don't do much web development programming so I wouldn't know for sure. The kind of stuff I do is a lot different.

Old thread but I just wanted to mention we're on PHP 8.1 now! I upgraded my development environments and production servers over the past year and a half.