Time for PHP5?

[eluser]esra[/eluser]
[quote author="drewtown" date="1218318058"]new versions of php are adopted way too slow, PHP6 is already in development and if what you say is correct only 40% of people are using php5 even. I'm sure EL would love to get to php5 and hopefully with the official death of version 4 hosts will start upgrading.[/quote]

About a year ago, only 12% of the hosts supported PHP5, so a considerable amount of progress has been made. However, there is still a lot of hosting clients out there still using applications written for PHP4. Based on a recent search to find a new host for two PHP5 Strict sites, I found that most hosts supported PHP5 Strict applications in one way or another, so that 40% number seems a bit odd to me. The release of the PHP 5.3 final with namespace support is probably going to cause a lot of interest in the development community as far as future applications go and yet moremigrations, but the existance of PHP4-only applications out there is probably going to be a continuing problem, requiring some hosts to use a VPS approach to support customer needs.

I would guess that EL will eventually take a Joomla-like approach to handling their migration at some point in time, offering both PHP4/PHP5 and PHP5-Strict versions of EE for a designated period.