PHP 5.6.0 Released 118
An anonymous reader writes The PHP team has announced the release of PHP 5.6.0. New features include constant scalar expressions, exponentiation using the ** operator, function and constant importing with the use keyword, support for file uploads larger than 2 GB, and phpdbg as an interactive integrated debugger SAPI. The team also notes important changes affecting compatibility. For example: "Array keys won't be overwritten when defining an array as a property of a class via an array literal," json_decode() is now more strict at parsing JSON syntax, and GMP resources are now objects. Here is the migration guide, the full change log, and the downloads page.
Re:It's powerful, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you really not figure it out?
First off, would it be quite easy for you to tell me off the top of your head what the date of Easter will be in 2021? How about just next year? The date it falls on it fairly complicated and not exactly simple to write an algorithm for.
Ok, but who will use it? I guess it comes as a surprise that it is a fairly important holiday for religious reasons and that a number of other holidays' dates are intertwined with Easter.
If you really see no practical application for that, well I guess you're just not trying hard enough.
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! (Score:5, Insightful)
PHP is a horrible programming language, but I know why people like PHP applications -- the ability to install an application on a LAMP stack by just untarring a single archive into the deployment directory is priceless.
Last time I tried to install a Python web application, I had to give the installer root privileges to install a bunch of junk in some system-wide module directory. No thanks.
Last time I tried to install a Ruby web application, I ran into a bunch of snafus related to newer versions of Ruby not being backwards compatible with older code, and discovered that the "right" way to do it was to install a whole new package management system that wasn't in sync with my OS's own package manager. No thanks to that, either.
It's not the knife... (Score:5, Insightful)
it's the cook that prepares the food. It's not the camera, it's the photographer that shoots the picture. It's not the racing car, it's the driver that wins the race. It's not the programming language, it's the programmer that creates the application.
All you whiners can bash PHP like you want. But a PHP website will still beat your Perl website if the PHP programmer is better than you. So, unless your coding skills are 100% perfect, you better start looking at your own flaws instead of wasting time at whining about a programming language that simply isn't your pick of choice. Please, it's time to grow up.
Re:It's not the knife... (Score:5, Insightful)
"... if the PHP programmer is better than you."
For every good-to-excellent PHP programmer there is a small army of mediocre-to-bad PHP programmers. You get chefs that deep-fry rubber boots, photographers that can't tell the lens from the viewfinder, and drivers that can't put a car in gear without breaking something.
But it also doesn't help when the programming language tells them that someone somewhere likes to eat overcooked footwear, or hands them a camera which is a featureless cube with two identical holes on either side, or takes away the gear shift and replaces it with a button labelled "Crash".
Re:Now almost as useful as python was 5 years ago! (Score:2, Insightful)
That's because PHP doesn't require anything extra except tuning max_execution_time and the memory limits to make it work for everyone. I'd demand extra money if I had to babysit your rails process and kill it when it consumes a gig of ram on a shared host.