I remember in 2004 that PHP 5 was released. At the time, I was not a great programmer (and I'm not sure I am yet either), but I definitely did not understand what made PHP 5 better, that's for sure. Now that I understand PHP better and use it much more on a regular basis, I know how much easier it is to develop web sites with PHP 5.

Back in 2004, hosts were, for good reason, not too eager to upgrade to PHP 5 because it was still not that widely used and therefore not as reliable as PHP 4. Also, it would most likely break some of the functionality of their customer's PHP 4-based sites. Sadly, a majority of hosts still give these reasons over 3 years later.

Thankfully, some good Open Source folks are working to change that. GoPHP5.org is a coalition of open source project developers and hosts who vow to be converted to PHP 5 by February 2008. The hosts will be running PHP 5 natively, and just to push the industry along, the projects such as Drupal and phpMyAdmin are no longer supporting PHP 4 on versions after February. Those of us who use PHP 5 can look forward to leaner, more efficient programs next year, and I, for one, don't think it can come too soon.