Fernando Javier Martin - 2011-07-15 15:51:15
Manuel, don't start yielling just because you read "deprecate" in the mail.
As you said this will not happen any time soon.
Some comments also argue that isn't necessary to deprecate: just let the developer choose, and that's an intermediate step which could work.
In development (you know that more than me) everythig keeps advancing, languages goes on making improvements (of every kind: cleanness, performance, bugs, etc) and today's IT world is always eager to require more and more from languages, developers and from hardware.
I guess the idea of "it just works, why should I care to change?" doesn't fits the modern development philosophy; but maybe the olde one, when each change or new release used to took a bunch of years.
Today everything goes MUCH faster and you have to stay up with that.
Regarding the "to deprecate ot to not deprecate" part: you know that PHP its quite popular for being almost "selft-taught" programming language (I come from that line).
There are PETA lines of ugly code lying around in forums and so on that uses the mysql_* way.
If new developers start consuming the wrong code (keep in mind that they're new and don't know the awkwards of it or have the ability to distinguish good from bad code) they just started with the wrong foot and they WILL NEED to make the switch anytime.
If we let them know from start what is the good way, new developments and developers will be better.
Also, IMO, I don't think that an application should remain untouched for a decade or more just because it simply works.
There are many improvements in all sort of orders and keeping a language fully backward compatible just adds the chance to introduce more bugs, make it harder for the dev team to keep going on and maintain it, and the language pack itself keeps growing more and more and more, bloating the server(s) - as a module, library, whatever.
We want/like a clean, modern, LIGHTWEIGHT and FAST programming language - at least me. :)
Finally: If the code structure is good, rewriting a DBAL file (I'm not even talking about a class) shouldn't be quite hard.
My 2 cents
