PHP was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer, Rasmus Lerdorf, in 1995 and he called it Personal Homepage Programming. He created it to be easy and simple to use by everyday people, not programmers, and to allow for web pages to interact with databases and do other things that pure HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) couldn't do.
Unfortunately, Rasmus allowed another group (the same group of people who want to do the world in - see the rest of this site) to become the developers for the programming language with the result that new versions are created every year with support for older versions being stopped after a period of time which means that, depending on your hosting company, your websites have to be continually looked after and have their PHP code updated otherwise you may end up with something not working if you use a lot of PHP code. That gets to be very tedious .... and expensive.
Again, the same bleating is made by 'the experts' that 'security' needs to be improved. Ever heard of .ASP (now ASP.NET, Microsoft's Active Server Pages language, which does very similar stuff to PHP) needing constant updating? Or breaking a site that has years old code in it? No, neither have I. ASP is updated for specific reasons, for example giving support to mobile devices. You can find out more about ASP here.
I understand that languages need to be updated occasionally, but every few weeks or months????? Give me a break! The original goal of PHP has now been lost and it is now a very complex language to learn and to keep abreast of.
Which gives the game away in more ways than one.....
The new group of assh***s redefined what PHP stands for. It now means 'PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor', which violates the laws of definitions in that the word or acronym itself cannot be part of its own definition! So it is actually a meaningless definition and can be very confusing to read. But that's what these people do 'dumbfound and confuse'. They are VERY good at it.