Written by: Robert R. Russell on Monday, August 24, 2020.
In general, No, No, No!
I have been mulling this question over because of recent discussions I am following about Java, WordPress hosting, and Python 2. I will start with Java. Java has become the modern COBOL in a lot of ways. An extremely verbose language designed around one programming paradigm. Excluding the inherent problems of OOP, and Java’s verbosity, Java has one other major issue version rot. Java 8 has been end of lifed for a bit now and a lot of people are now learning that all of the ABI compatibility prior to version 8 comes with a load of technical debt. Most of the language syntax improvements that help with Java’s verbosity required ABI incompatible changes in the runtime and incompatible changes to the language syntax between Java 8 and 11. This means you can’t run Java 8 code on the Java 11 libraries and you can’t recompile that code with the Java 11 compiler either. To make matters worse Oracle now plans to allow such breaking changes about every 2 years now.
Both the Python 2 to Python 3 migration problems and the PHP5 to PHP7 migration mirror the issues with Java 8 to Java 11. Though, they have generally been better handled, especially the Python change. The Python authors released code that makes most of the syntactical adjustments automatically requiring a human for the areas that can’t be cleaned up by a computer. Yes, the ABI of the language changed but unlike Java 8 to Java 11 there is a migration tool that allows most python 2 source code to be migrated without a complete rewrite.
I am not as familiar with the details of the PHP 5 to 7 transition as I am with the Java 8 to 11, and Python 2 to 3 transitions. What I do know is that it has been in the works for a while. From the perspective of a programmer using the language PHP 7 isn’t a massive change. From the perspective of extension creators and hosting providers, it was a big deal initially. We are now 6, almost 7, years past this change and a lot of hosts still run PHP5.
I will have more to say about this topic in the future but for now have a good day.
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