Martijn "Over 40% of WordPress installations are on PHP 5.2 or 5.3 and according to W3Techs' PHP statistics ~52% of all PHP servers use a version older than PHP 5.4." -- github.com/PhotoBa...

Mark Dain PHP 5.2 is from 2006. It's stuff like this that gives PHP a bad reputation; it's next to impossible to build great stuff with 5.2 as your baseline. Not to mention the security holes! What a mess :(

Nkrs It's not PHP's problem per se, but rather problem of hosts who don't update to the newer versions. But then, if they did update often, there would be many broken websites due to breaking changes between versions; since many people are not programmers, they could lose their site if they don't know how to make the update.

Mark Dain I didn't say it was PHP's fault; it just gives PHP a bad reputation as some ignorant developer looks at 5.2 and thinks it's what PHP is. Try looking at 5.6, things have gotten much better

Nkrs I didn't say it was either, but rather that there's an entire pyramid of dependence. PHP's devs make changes from version to version, some of them being ones that can potentially break existing code, Linux package maintainers also get their fingers in there (e.g. in one version Debian guys changed the JSON parser to a GPL one and broke people's code), and app developers in the end need to know what works where and how it affects their code. There's no clean upgrade path for PHP, and hosts aren't upgrading to prevent losing their users.