Modern PHP features explained - PHP 8.0 and 8.1 (Laravel News)

I understand that this is a PHP related article, but given that different versions of PHP are not fully backwards compatible and that hosting companies tend to drop the support for older versions, it is the case that old PHP software that is uploaded to some hosting account just stops working. In some cultures there is an understanding of craftsmanship that things have to be reliable and sturdy enough to last until they will be replaced either due to natural wear over some longer period of time or the crafted products become obsolete from their features point of view. Think of Sweden, other parts of Scandinavia, Germany, etc. And then there is the American culture, where the assumption seems to be that about 50% of products will just fail to meet the advertised properties and will break relatively quickly. A business that would try such an American stunt in Sweden, would not stay in business in Sweden for long. Again, think of Volvo versus Ford, like, in modern times Ford is not that bad and actually has a chance in Sweden, but You know the reputation difference between those two brands.

The same with software. The solutions that Americans tolerate, just can not be copied one-to-one to Sweden, Norway, Finland and alike. This means that to just pick some library from GitHub, SourceForge or some other code repository often times means making a small, infamous, private fork of it, where the building system is overhawled/replaced, dependencies are copied to be part of the project, etc. It's a LOT of hard work. And now the PHP. Frankly, I quit using PHP as a main language and use it only for calling a console application that implements the actual web application. I won't tell, what language I use for implementing the console application, I do not need the flame war, but the main usefulness of PHP for me is that it's an adapter between the web server and my console application.

It's not that American's do not produce high quality and sturdy products, but for some reason, many of them, specially from the Silicon Valley area, choose not to. For example, the Leatherman multi-tools from Washingto state, Portland, are really nice and really high quality, have lasted for years. Once Boeing planes were manufactured at the "same area" of U.S., Washington state, the Boeing planes were literally if not the world's best, safest, high-quality, planes, then at least at the top, unlike the modern nonsense that is manufactured at way more southern part of the U.S. With some exceptions there seem to be the same kind of pattern in Europe: industrial robots from Northgern Europe tend to be way more reliable than the southern versions and Germany, with the modern German quality, is roughly somewhere in the middle, like, not bad, Germans actually value reliability and functionality, but, what I've seen from my personal experience, Germans like to "crash"/fail_with the first iteration of the product first and then start making the product more sturdy and then end up with the good product after multiple iterations, while the northerners in Europe are more sceptical and "say": that darn thing is going to fail anyway, so we might as well design some extra sturdiness to it right from the very start and then see, how it fails and what needs to be done at the next iterations.

It's really about culture. In the case of software, the actual list of requirements is a combination of client requirements and the list of requirements that the developer adds to the final list. Developers' requirement lists depend on the culture of the developers. For better and for worse.

Thank You for reading my comment.