Hi Matt, have you read Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" yet? It has an interesting perspective on what drives the trend to minimize pay for writers.
This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did.
It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.
cweagans is right. PHP is deeply unfashionable, ridiculous even to some programmers using other langauges. But quietly, somewhere out of sight, it has been enjoying something of a renaissance in recent years. Generally I'm pleased with changes in the culture, tools, standards and even in the language. But just can't get behind this decision to keep mcrypt.
It appears those with a vote regard adoption of PHP 7 as the higher priority and therefore compat with existing code using mcrypt must be ensured. http://news.php.net/php.internals/82191
I haven't used php, but the situation described at that link is codependence.
a: "Most of our users don't care about security."
b: "OK then they can continue using old broken versions."
a: "No, then they won't be secure! Therefore it must be easy to upgrade."
b: "How?"
a: "By not making the proposed security improvements."
This seems like a recipe for losing any users that do care about security, which is not a viable strategy over the long term.
