Phil Sturgeon has posted about something he calls the "neverending muppet debate of PHP 6 versus PHP 7. As the PHP language moves forward, the PHP 5.x series is coming to a close. The discussion as started up whether to name it "PHP 6" or "PHP 7" and both sides have their proponents.

There are a few major, important conversations happening in the PHP internals mailing list as we speak: The Facebook lot heading up a specification based off of PHP 5.6 Should phpng be moved into master to be the base of the next major PHP version How can we best go about scalar typehinting? There is also another conversation: Should it be PHP 6 or PHP 7 Wait... what?

He goes on to provide a little context, pointing out that back in 2010 PHP 6 was being slated for release as the next major version of the language (this was around the PHP 5.2 days). Unfortunately, it stalled out and some of what was planned went into PHP 5.3. This didn't stop publishers from releasing books and articles about "PHP 6" though. It's already being put up for a vote with "PHP 7" pulling ahead. Phil also includes more context around the discussions, sharing the main points of each side and snippets from the RFC and mailing list thread currently ongoing.