He complains about how internals lacks leadership, so why doesn't step up and fill that void instead of running away?
Rambling On [PHP] Internals
31–40 of 169 posts
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#32He complains about how internals lacks leadership, so why doesn't step up and fill that void instead of running away?
Because you can't take a toxic community and suddenly say 'Okay, I'm in charge!' without everyone else tearing you down. And perhaps he has other things to do with his time than babysit a bunch of (apparently) arrogant, condescending grown children.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#33He complains about how internals lacks leadership, so why doesn't step up and fill that void instead of running away?
He tried that. He also cites an example :
"To illustrate why this is an issue, I posted this reply explicitly asking
for feedback on two items. How many replies did I get? One. A single reply.
Oh, there were more replies to the thread afterwards. But they were too
busy arguing over the other off-topic or non-constructive things in the
above list to actually discuss the open issues with the proposal."
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#34PHP 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 :)
As someone who's had to deploy PHP apps to various servers on various operating systems, I can guarantee you that your third line is absolutely not the case. You can deploy much code to many servers on some operating systems, but it's far from universal.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#35He complains about how internals lacks leadership, so why doesn't step up and fill that void instead of running away?
Beyond the fact that the PHP community doesn't really do the BDFL thing, the process for adopting changes to the language is designed to be run by group consensus, not by the older model of having a small group of self-appointed leaders.
I suppose a core problem is that before the current process, a very large number of the people causing trouble happened to also be the self-appointed leaders.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#36Is 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?
No. This is a big guy in internals. Sad to see him step back like this, but totally understandable.
Internals suffers from simply having too many voices. As with all things you need a leader that is reasonable and can push things in the right direction.
For example, I don't think I've seen a constructive discussion on having some kind of object literal in the language to replace something like
$obj = (object)['prop' => 'val', ...];Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#37Any 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 th…
Every time I'm forced to use a forum for something, I wish usenet hadn't succumbed to spam & binary warez. Many of the clients from 20 years ago have more (useful) features than modern forums.
It's probably about time to reinvent it again, tunneled over Websockets with a Flat Responsive html5 Retina-Aware Interhyperface or something.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#38I think the only hope PHP has of continuing development is if someone big like Facebook can add some direction to it. Maybe they will but I think last I checked even they were giving up on using it for much more then a thin veneer to their back end services.
Even if a large company like Facebook did want to help add direction, they'd have to do so within the confines of internals and the RFC process. The prehistoric luddites and trolls on the list would shout down any truly language-improving proposals in the same way they always do, regardless of source. The only way to get rid of those unwanted elements would be a fork, but that would be unproductive. The remaining thi…
> The remaining thing keeping PHP so popular is how amazingly ubiquitous it is. A fork wouldn't have that advantage, especially in comparison to languages and environments that are objectively better anyway.
Initially, I believe you are correct, but I am not sure long term. PHP is easy for a system admin to install. Other than perl, I am not sure if there is anything out there that is as easy. I would imagine a fork, if it wants to survive, would need to be just as easy.
I do wonder why PHP has never really had any competition in the "super easy for my system admin" category.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#39Am 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?
Yes, you're the only one.
Re: Rambling On [PHP] Internals
#40Any 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 th…
I honestly don't understand why everybody uses phpBB. The OSS project that I was thinking of when I made this post (zero-k.info, a small FOSS rts) rolled their own for just the reasons you described - it's primitive in some ways but at least it doesn't page.