Cracks in the Foundation (PHP Advent)

The 2011 PHP Advent site has an article by Gwynne Raskind on the challenges facing PHP and how they are being addressed. "PHP has always been an evolving, almost-organic language. It has been rewritten from the bottom up at least four times, with massive internal changes to the engine at least twice more. Through all these mutations, however, its external interface - the language itself - has remained quite similar for a long time. Nearly everything that can be pointed to as different between PHP 3 and PHP 5.4 is an addition or extension to the language, not a change in existing behavior. There are exceptions, such as the new object model, but by and large, a PHP coder looking at PHP 5 code will be able to make complete sense of PHP 3, and vice versa. All of these versions share one flaw: there is no single specification of the language!"

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