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Rambling On [PHP] Internals

blog.ircmaxell.com

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Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#21

Post by Supermighty »

maratd wrote: post #13
Supermighty wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not looking for up/down votes. He's looking for a discussion. Which well-meaning participants in an open source project should be able to have with some civility.

You can find discussion greatly facilitated when everyone has the power to silence the imbeciles by down-voting them into oblivion.

I agree that technical solutions help. But they will never be a real solution. The eager troll will find a way around them. The real problem is a lack of strong leadership and stewardship. There is no BDFL setting the tone and punishing those who don't toe the line. Or maybe there is and this is the result. Ha!

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#22

Post by citricsquid »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #16

Am I the only one who feels like this is a temper-tantrum of somebody who wanted to be in charge of more toys, punctuated with some salient (but obvious) points about PHP?

ircmaxwell has contributed a hell of a lot to PHP recently, this is not some worthless shmuck complaining, this is someone that can and does provide significant value to the community.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#23

Post by jlgreco »

Pxtl wrote: post #3

Any large community has these problems. This is the advantage to using forum engines that allow non-anonymous upvotes/downvotes over a naive mail-list - people can silently agree and separate the wheat from the chaff, and consensus becomes far more visible. You can even give the important contributors greater "weight" to the ups/downs (this is not a democracy, contributors are worth more).

All the "forum" software that I have seen (opposed to more "ephemeral discussion" software like HN/Slashdot/Reddit) provides such a goddamn awful reading/browsing/discoverability experience that any benefits it may have over mailing lists are completely lost. Just for starters, mailing lists allow the discussion to thread (as do sites like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit) and don't force you to use a shoddy web interface that shows you only a few dozen posts on a single page. If I have to scroll to the bottom of a page and click a link that says "513", I am having a bad day.

I have never seen a large open-source project that uses "forums" in a way that doesn't impose massive overhead. Without fail, forums for open source projects are dreadful while mailing lists are, with a few notable exceptions, pleasant. When I am looking for information about a project and discover that all the project officially has is a forum, my heart sinks; it ranks up there with finding out the project is still hosted on sourceforge or a mega/rapidshare/whatever clone.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#24

Post by noelwelsh »

dubcanada wrote: post #9
noelwelsh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The PHP code is the tip of the iceberg. The real work in Facebook is done by the many systems behind it, which are very definitely not written in PHP.

Facebook is entirely written in PHP. It uses all sorts of databases and other systems to handle stuff, but so does every other website. It's still written in PHP. Facebook has their own PHP fork, which they use/and modify. I do not believe that Facebook pushes their modifications to PHP as a whole.

Those "databases and other systems" make up a significant portion of their code base, and in many cases Facebook either contributes to their development or created them internally. To claim that Facebook is written entirely in PHP is false. Examples:

- Cassandra (Java) was created by Facebook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra

- Giraph (Java) has significant contributions from Facebook and I believe was founded there http://giraph.apache.org/

- FP (Erlang IIRC) at Facebook http://cufp.org/videos/functional-programming-facebook

- Facebook's page listing some of the open source projects they contribute to https://developers.facebook.com/opensource/

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#25

Post by McGlockenshire »

ck2 wrote: post #10

Subscribe to it for awhile and you'll see. It also turned off the suhosin author to the point where he moved onto other stuff. He had some great ideas, now lost (no longer works with PHP > 5.3 ) But Zend shows up and folds back in some great stuff into PHP once in awhile. Take a look at their now opensourced opcode cache, it's faster than all others.

> But Zend shows up and folds back in some great stuff into PHP once in awhile.

That's kind of the exception instead of the rule, really. Andi and Zeev are very, very infrequent contributors to php-internals.

They proposed releasing the thing that became opcache after Rasmus finally convinced everyone how much of a pain in the rear end maintaining APC was.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#26

Post by jarrett »

gesman wrote: post #14

PHP is addictive. You can create whole web app in one PHP file from scratch and it will have everything including API and DB management layer and be secure and fully functioning. And it will work on all servers and on all operating systems. Millions are made by average developers developing themes and plugins for wordpress. Hard to beat all that. #drama is for queens :)

> You can create whole web app in one PHP file from scratch and it will have everything including API and DB management layer and be secure and fully functioning.

You can. But I shudder to imagine one file containing everything you just said. Also, I'm skeptical about the security claim. I'm not talking about PHP-specific vulnerabilities here. Rather, the developer of such an app might be pretty naive, and might build in his own vulnerabilities.

> And it will work on all servers and on all operating systems.

The same is true of most mainstream languages. Ruby, Python, Java, and Node are probably the big competitors in the web dev space. All of them can run on Windows.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#27

Post by mintplant »

0x0 wrote: post #12

Is this just a case of meritocracy at play? I haven't followed the full discussion and events leading up to here, but would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

Given the responses cited at the end of the post, I would assume that the author was previously a contributor of some significance to the project.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#28

Post by 0x0 »

mintplant wrote: post #27
0x0 wrote: post #12

Is this just a case of meritocracy at play? I haven't followed the full discussion and events leading up to here, but would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

Given the responses cited at the end of the post, I would assume that the author was previously a contributor of some significance to the project.

I just grepped the php-5.4.19 source and the only mention I found was for a bug reported and fixed in some earlier version, though.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#29

Post by McGlockenshire »

0x0 wrote: post #12

Is this just a case of meritocracy at play? I haven't followed the full discussion and events leading up to here, but would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

> would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

Anthony (ircmaxell) contributed some patches to the past few major releases (including the new password API and PBKDF functions) and is well-respected by a large number of PHP developers.

He's also proposed nearly a dozen RFCs including working patches, most of which include incremental but major feature improvements. He and some of the others are trying to improve PHP as a language.

The problem is that there are a handful of people that do not want language changes, think that some changes are confusing for developers, and are generally not actually able to understand the use case behind things, like, oh, I dunno, named parameters. So instead of having a well-reasoned discussion, they basically shout the proposal down.

Thankfully the RFC and voting process can bypass the volume of their arguments, but not always.

Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals

#30

Post by gngeal »

gesman wrote: post #14

PHP is addictive. You can create whole web app in one PHP file from scratch and it will have everything including API and DB management layer and be secure and fully functioning. And it will work on all servers and on all operating systems. Millions are made by average developers developing themes and plugins for wordpress. Hard to beat all that. #drama is for queens :)

Common Lisp is addictive.

You can create a whole web app in one CL file from scratch and it will have everything including API and DB management layer and be secure and fully functioning.

And it will work on all servers and on all operating systems.

Also hard to beat that.

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