[wp-hackers] Drop PHP4 support entirely?

[Sabin Iacob]

Computer Guru wrote:
> PHP is a powerful -web scripting language- not a general-purpose language.
>   

many people would argue that this is ok for a web interface that in some 
way (homegrown protocol/XMLRPC/SOAP/REST/JSON/your acronym here) 
communicates with a backend written in a programming language (which is 
not necessarily C/C++/Java - Perl and Python have much better 
integration with Unix and are far easier to secure and debug (ever tried 
to find your way through a threaded STL C++ application? oh, the horror...))

> Sure, on Linux you have the (PHP|Python|Perl)-Gtk libraries which let you
> (very badly) tie a PHP script to a non-HTML GUI, but the best they can do is
> call up CLI commands and attempt to parse their output. So while you can
> have the PHP script call up `shutdown -r now` you're going to be SEVERELY
> limited by the lack of communication with other applications and the
> Linux/Windows API for whatever it is you're doing.
>   

as someone else said, those are just bindings that let you access the 
Gtk/Qt/wx/whatever libraries, they won't usually limit you much