Back in 2005, I wrote a story for InternetNews.com where I wrote that I expected PHP 6 to be out in 2006. Here we are three years later and guess what? No PHP 6.
Back in 2005, the promise of PHP 6 was to be the next big thing for the open source dynamic language. At the time, I remember joking with Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans about Perl 6, which is a release that also has been promised for years and still hasn’t been released either.
Instead what has happened to PHP 6 is it has become the horizon of PHP. A place that you can see off in the distance, but can never be reached.
It’s also a place where features are backported from, as was the case with the PHP 5.3 release which included several key features that were originally intended for PHP 6.
Among the PHP 6 features now in PHP 5.3 is internationalization support.
“The question is now with the internationalization extension, what is the gap and how much benefit do we get from PHP 6 versus 5.3?” Zend CEO Andi Gutmans recently told me.
