5.3 Come out in 2009, I has a small list of backwards compatibility breaking changes (http://www.php.net/manual/en/migration53.incompatible.php), no reason for anyone really not to have adopted it.

my hosting is still on 5.2.17 and are in the "security testing" phase of 5.3.

I wonder what they mean by security testing? What exactly are they testing and how? BTW given that there's no security patches released for 5.2 anymore (while bugs are still being found and published of course) - their understanding of security is certainly unorthodox.

I retract my security testing statement. The are currently testing if 5.3 is stable on their servers and have no ETA for the upgrade :-(. This was in mid October.

I think this is more about not pissing off random untechnical customers that haven't bothered to update their off the shelf blogging software since 2005. Guess the tipping point is when they are losing more customers not upgrading than they will upgrading.

> many people haven't even adopted 5.3.

> no reason for anyone really not to have adopted it.

These things are not mutually exclusive. I.e. you could be write, but Klinky definitely is.

True, I think it is a valid point for arguments about language features though. Fair enough to say that anything in 5.4 isn't production ready yet or had the time to trickle down to hosts but you can't judge PHP on versions before 5.3 as anyone can put a small amount of effort in and have everything 5.3 has to offer.

Just an FYI, but they are at the end of their testing the RC of 5.4, so it should be declared stable in about 2-3 weeks.

Today, PHP 5.4 are released as stable.

Until it is ubiquitous, short syntax should still be used with caution.