Jurriën Stutterheim posted an interesting article on the future of PHP recently (“PHP… what to say?”). In it he argues that PHP shouldn’t try to maintain complete backwards compatibility in the next release, saying,
“PHP 6 will make or break PHP as a language. For PHP to make it, it needs a clear vision of what it wants to be. Trying to maintain compatibility with ancient and mostly poorly written scripts can’t be part of this vision.”
The language can’t advance, he says, if it’s chained to outdated yet popular open-source projects.
But here’s the problem. If you’re intent on being the lingua franca of the Web, backwards compatibility is critical. It’s part of that compatibility-stability-security triumvirate that users love.
You see this conflict elsewhere in the tech industry. Microsoft’s greatest strength and biggest weakness is backwards compatibility. Users love it because decade-old programs still run in Windows. If you’re, say, a medical transcription company that uses an application written in the late ’90s, your company is going to stay with Windows indefinitely, because no external factor forces you to update that application. And Microsoft isn’t going to do anything to jeopardize that.
This is the same wall that PHP is headed toward. I view it as a wall. Others might not; it’s certainly not a bad place to be at the moment. On the plus side, it means PHP developers have more opportunities afforded to them because of the popularity of the language. The downside is that they can look left and right and see niche languages innovating in compelling ways. The more “cosmopolitan” PHP programmers inevitably develop language envy and move on, but these are exactly the kind of developers PHP should fight to retain.
It doesn’t have to be this way. PHP could flourish as a smaller language. This is the tack that Apple has taken, and it seems to work well for the company and its users. Apple is one of the most innovative companies in the entire tech industry owing in no small part to this strategy.
For my part, I’d like to see first-class functions and closures included in the language. An object-oriented API ($file->read(1024)) alongside the procedural functions (fread($resource, 1024)) would also be welcome.
But none of that will happen, because PHP is a language in decline. Not a decline in usage—it will only continue to expand its reach—but in the addition of innovative features from other languages. There will be no need to evolve; most of the agitators for change will have moved on.
There is one hope for PHP, however: Zend Framework. I think if it can gain a foothold among developers, some of these trends can be reversed. Hopefully (for PHP) everyone hasn’t moved on to Ruby by then.