Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PHP needs a vision

news.php.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 182 posts

Re: PHP needs a vision

#2

Post by cies »

Too late if you ask me, let me explain:

Programming languages are hard to change, very hard, because it will certainly break programs written in it in many places. So if you want a programming language with a vision you should start with it, or simply accept it has no vision and it merely goes with the whim of its maintainers. The latter is what I believe happened to PHP. No biggy, there are plenty of languages that do have strong visions and are very suitable for web-development; just move on.

If PHP was to implement a vision, it would soon not be PHP anymore, whether that is a good thing is up to the users of that language. In that case I foretell a hack of a lot of porting effort and a fork (facebook?)... :)

Re: PHP needs a vision

#4

Post by saraid216 »

Stas responded here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/64775

"PHP's vision is being simple and practical and focused on the web. PHP is what people use to get their first site off the ground. PHP is what a web designer learns when he/she wants to go into programming. PHP is what a random Joe uses when he needs to whip up a page and he's in "do it yourself" mind. PHP is what you expect everybody to be able to handle, and everything to be able to run. It is not to serve everybody, every use case and every possible need."

Frankly, I don't understand this vision at all. Is PHP supposed to be a beginner's language that a webdev eventually moves on from? I mean, don't get me wrong: I used PHP for exactly that when I graduated from high school. But is the directive really, "Real programmers don't use our language"?

Re: PHP needs a vision

#5

Post by h2s »

That closing appeal to deal with the abusiveness of the php.internals list fell a little flat given the opening statement of "shut up". I loved Rasmus' answer to this though.

http://news.php.net/php.internals/64771

    > The vision has been the same for years. A general purpose scripting
    > language with a focus on web development. You are simply saying you want
    > the vision to be more specific than that because everyone has a
    > different view of what web development means. But even if we narrow the
    > vision, it will still be open to a lot interpretation. We try to strike
    > a balance between the different and changing views of web development
    > the same way we strike a balance between appealing to weekend warriors
    > and top-100 trafficed sites. No vision statement is going to answer the
    > question of whether annotations should be in docblocks or in the core
    > language. That's simply not what vision statements do.
    > 
    > -Rasmus
Maintaining clarity of purpose in a project can be difficult sometimes. Kudos to Rasmus for managing to do so in the midst of what looks like it's gearing up to be another php.internals shitstorm.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#7

Post by herge »

saraid216 wrote: post #4

Stas responded here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/64775 "PHP's vision is being simple and practical and focused on the web. PHP is what people use to get their first site off the ground. PHP is what a web designer learns when he/she wants to go into programming. PHP is what a random Joe uses when he needs to whip up a page and he's in "do it yourself" mind. PHP is what you expect everybody to be able to handle,…

Python has often been called an easy to learn language and a good first start because it tries to be easy to read.

Does that mean that it is also a beginner's language that people eventually are supposed to move on from?

Re: PHP needs a vision

#8

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

php's internals mailing list is chaos. It's a pantomime of "YES-NO-YES-NO-YES-NO" ad nauseum. And that is why PHP is such a horrible, inconsistent language. It has never had any consistent direction. JS was bad at first, but its mistakes are slowly being corrected and it is become more consistent and coherent. PHP was bad at first, and they keep breaking things as well as improving it.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#9

Post by benatkin »

jtreminio wrote: post #6
Tichy wrote: post #3

PHP needs to die Sorry...

Empty, non-contributing comments like yours that appear in every single thread about PHP on HN need to stop being posted. Not sorry, I mean it. Stop.

Your comment made me curious about it and I see that Tichy has about 15K in karma. If he and a hundred people like him quit HN it would probably fix a lot of what's wrong with it.

Re: PHP needs a vision

#10

Post by TylerE »

herge wrote: post #7
saraid216 wrote: post #4

Stas responded here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/64775 "PHP's vision is being simple and practical and focused on the web. PHP is what people use to get their first site off the ground. PHP is what a web designer learns when he/she wants to go into programming. PHP is what a random Joe uses when he needs to whip up a page and he's in "do it yourself" mind. PHP is what you expect everybody to be able to handle,…

Python has often been called an easy to learn language and a good first start because it tries to be easy to read. Does that mean that it is also a beginner's language that people eventually are supposed to move on from?

The difference is that Python is actually a designed language, rather than an unholy congealed mass.
Post reply on HN