There are a couple of things in here that are actual issues, but they seem small in scope, and easy to work around.
As for the is_a changes, I think it's probably for the better, as they say, you have to break some eggs to make an omlette. Also, the article first complains about not having Unit Tests to catch this, and then later complains about it being ignored on release. Ultimately unit tests are great for refactoring, but when code is actually being changed, some sort of process needs to be followed for that (dictatorship, consensus building, anarchy?)
I program in PHP, and we don't depend on too many outside libraries. And for cases where we do, we will simply fix these issues.
It used to be that upgrading PHP was much 'easier' to do, meaning you'd just go out and do it, and would hardly breaking anything (at least in my experience). However lately it seems that the risk is higher. However I welcome this, because it means the language is progressing and we're getting a lot of additional things. For all the projects I've worked on, we make sure the code works with that version of PHP. Unit/integration/regression/selenium/using it on development for awhile/whatever are all valid things to do, if you have issues you fix them and move on.
5.3 was great, excited for 5.4 with traits as well. It's a great time to be writing PHP.
The array/sorting things are sometimes just things developers will have to deal with until someone makes new methods and deprecates the old ones.
I used to think that the code base needed to be perfect, no extra cruft, only code that's necessary, switch parameter order just to make things match. However in doing so it adds a tremendous amount of pain and risk. My OCD does't want to handle it, and it's always good to strive to get to that point, but ultimately nothing is perfect, so might as well deal.
There are a couple of things in here that are actual issues, but they seem small in scope, and easy to work around.
As for the is_a changes, I think it's probably for the better, as they say, you have to break some eggs to make an omlette. Also, the article first complains about not having Unit Tests to catch this, and then later complains about it being ignored on release. Ultimately unit tests are great for refactoring, but when code is actually being changed, some sort of process needs to be followed for that (dictatorship, consensus building, anarchy?)
I program in PHP, and we don't depend on too many outside libraries. And for cases where we do, we will simply fix these issues.
It used to be that upgrading PHP was much 'easier' to do, meaning you'd just go out and do it, and would hardly breaking anything (at least in my experience). However lately it seems that the risk is higher. However I welcome this, because it means the language is progressing and we're getting a lot of additional things. For all the projects I've worked on, we make sure the code works with that version of PHP. Unit/integration/regression/selenium/using it on development for awhile/whatever are all valid things to do, if you have issues you fix them and move on.
5.3 was great, excited for 5.4 with traits as well. It's a great time to be writing PHP.