>Flatly, re-writing a several decade's old, matured codebase in today's flavor-of-the-week language is not a good idea. It's a waste of time and effort.
That's the sort of thinking we'd benefit from having less. Legacy is a terrible burden.
How would you fix this without breaking most PHP code out there?
How would you fix ==, > and < behaviour without breaking most PHP code out there?
How would you fix Unicode without breaking most PHP code out there?
If PHP fixed things like this, it would be a decent programming language, but it would also break a lot of things. Kinda of like what python3 did, only that it didn't have to break quite so much, since python2 was already pretty decent.
The reason for that is that python2=>3 fixed several fundamental problems. 5.6 => 7 is just a incremental upgrade, whatever the version numbering tells you. Most of the PHP problems are still there.
> But why improve performance by switching to a language that's well suited to the task at hand when you can do it by switching to a language that's hip?
php 7 is just as fast, or a teeny bit slower, than 5. Isn't that a rather interesting result, given how the php community has claimed huge performance increases in 7?
If we could reliably track politicians' money flows, their opinions, their comments and their actual actions in a system that's easily queriable, it might just be easy enough for the common people to be more aware of their rulers.
The sad Jolla tale made me seriously ponder about making a full change to Apple. I'm currently testing how an iPad Pro might work for a 95% laptop replacement.