In a new post to his blog today, Brandon Savage talks about the "fade time" for PHP4 and how, really, it's gone on long enough.

Sadly, developing for PHP 4 backwards compatibility is something that companies and individuals are still doing. Wordpress released a new Widget API in version 2.8 that relies on the old-style PHP 4 constructor. Apparently, for Wordpress and many other developers, wide adoption is more important than language improvements.

This all came about because he noticed the Log PEAR package still supported PHP4. He's been making updates, though, to bring it out of the shadows and into the light of PHP5-only support.

Still, I look forward to the day when PHP 4 finally does go away forever, leaving us with a much better code base and happier developers.

Brian Moon has called for the death of die():

Now, I have no actual authority to do so. My PHP CVS karma does not extend that far. And I doubt it will actually get removed despite it being nothing more than an alias for exit now. No, what I would like to call a death to is the usage of die such as [echoing out a message to the user instead of doing proper error handling].

He points out a few perfectly viable alternatives like the exception handlers, the trigger_error function and custom error handlers.

The community has responded to the fact that PHP4 is officially "dead" with a few posts to their blogs. Here's the list so far:

• Havard Eide - RIP PHP4
• Christian Wenz - PHP 4.4.9 Released (And Why You Should Be Worried If You Consider Installing It)
• Stefan Priebsch - PHP 4 is dead. An obituary
• Derick Rethans - RIP PHP4
• Sebastian Bergmann - KTHXBYE PHP 4
• Stefan Esser - PHP 4 - Requiescat in Pace
• Paul Jones - My Birthday Present From php.net
• Ken Guest - PHP 4 - this parrot is deceased!
• Christopher Jones - PHP 4 final-ever-last-terminal release is available
• Chris Shiflett - End of Life for PHP 4
• David Coallier - Small Goodbye to PHP4
• Gennady Feldman - The last day of PHP4
• Jacques Marneweck - So long and thank you for all the fish, PHP4
• Daniel Cousineau - End of an Era (Goodbye to PHP 4)
• Travis Swicegood - Today is the day!
• Lukas Smith - A short goodbye to 4.x
• Bill Gaffney - PHP 4 ends its life with final release 4.4.9
• ComputerWorld - PHP 4 is dead, long live PHP 4
• Evan Sims - PHP is dead, long live PHP! (finally.)
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney - Zend Framework 1.6.0 Preview, or, PHP 4 is Dead
• ZDNet - The Last PHP 4

If you aren't sure what they're talking about - the last day for official PHP 4 support is today, 08.08.08. Only PHP 5 will be supported from here on. It is highly recommended that you upgrade your applications to run on the latest PHP 5 version, 5.2.

Builder.com.au has picked up on "the death of PHP4" story that's been making the rounds in the community ever since the announcement late last week:

The still popular version 4 of PHP, an open-source scripting language that lets servers create customised Web pages such as online catalogues, will lose its support after a seven-year run. [...] The announcement came on the third anniversary of the launch of PHP 5, and project programmers said they want to focus on the upcoming PHP 6. PHP 4 was released in 2000.

They mention some of the issues that this will cause with hosting companies and developers alike and includes quotes from Andi Gutmans, Matt Mullenweg and Rasmus Lerdorf.