PHP needs a vision

Personally I find nothing much 'general purpose' about PHP. The language has configuration files! That alone prohibits me from doing anything generic with it.

So all that's left for me is 'focus on web development'. And to be honest: I think today it is not even so good at that. We have server side JS (Node), Ruby, Python and Java -- all freely available with huge communities. Does PHP stack up against these today?

I sure see that back in the days, when cgi scripts in Perl were the norm, PHP had huge advantages over its direct competition in open source web dev land.

To me Rasmus merely underlines the lack of vision, or ability to act on one.

Questioning the value of a technology which inhabits the technology industry much like a cancer is not empty.

PHP needed a vision 15 years ago. It was originally called "Personal Home Page" and intended to only slightly extend the functionality of Server-Side Includes. People tend to forget that.

On a more positive note:

I think the Symfony team actually has the vision: provided it has to be with PHP, let's make a full stack web development framework (like Rails) that does not suck, and create heaps of interesting components/libraries that can be used perfectly on their own in the process!

These guys and girls are showing to what extend PHP can be pushed, they also build a fair share of general purpose libs that the PHP community badly needed (e.g.: composer).

It you are looking for PHP with a vision, line yourself up with Symfony: they seem to have it.

Jokingly: If web development is what PHP is useful for, then Symfony simply needs to be shipped with it :)

Plenty of vision is communicated from their site, and it all makes sense:

http://symfony.com/symfony-at-a-glance

http://symfony.com/elevator-pitches

I couldn't agree more, and I'm a fan of PHP. It's a swiss army knife of a language, allowing you to program however you want. C programmers can code procedurally and java guys can jump in and basically go all out with the OOP constructs provided. I've watched PHP get better over the years, and it continually does so, but after having switched recently to Ruby, I have to say a solid "Benevolent Dictator" would probably not be such a bad thing for the language. Ruby has its paradigms, its own way of doing things, and you frankly can't develop software in many ways PHP allows you to, but for me Ruby is still a much more succint and beautiful lang, one I enjoy programming in more, I think partially because it has this, a set way of thinking about software design. I mean unit tests are in the stdlib for example, and you can't program long in the language without using utils, gems, etc, that all are chalk full of test suits that pass.

IMHO, a programming language should not just focus on itself or whether it has such and such feature, but on how it can be used in the entire software development cycle. This is something Go and Ruby are doing exceptionally well, and is why I like using them so much to build software, whether its web or otherwise. Probably because of its history as a template language embedded into HTML (way back when :), PHP has still got some growing pains in order to build up its software development paradigms, but I'm still hopefull, it has gone amazingly far and continues to improve.

This is irrelevant and does not add to the discussion.

Just like Reddit, Karma is not intended to say "my voice has more weight than yours". Karma is a way of letting people know you agree with them, but, just as in a court of law, if you can find one person willing to speak the truth they can stand strong in a house of lies.

Long and short, PHP is going to continue for some time, (just like COBOL, just like assembly) and wishing it was dead is about as effective as a life-savings program subsidized by the Tooth Fairy.