⇥ Thoughts for a new year: PHP as the new Java

December 17, 2007
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If one manages to dig through all the noise on the PHP internals mailing list, there’s a strange feeling of caution coming out of the core development team that, for some reason, just doesn’t feel like it belongs in a PHP discussion list.

Historically, PHP has been developed following the scratch-an-itch method: someone has an idea, or needs something that the platform doesn’t provide, comes up with a solution and either discusses it with the rest of the development team, or (in rarer cases, at least in the past) on the internals list and then posts it to the codebase.

This development process makes for some haphazard functionality, and has, in the past, been the source of many annoyances that need to be handled with extreme care—both in how they are fixed and in how they are maintained for backwards compatibility.

However, some of what are arguably PHP’s most interesting and features have also been born out of this very same system—for example:

Object orientation in PHP 4 were added almost as an afterthought, and it showed. Despite the many problems that they caused, however, they also made PHP development worthwhile for many people and served as the main inspiration for the development of PHP 5, which, in turn, opened the door to many of the new features introduced by the latter.
SimpleXML was perhaps misnamed, still has a lot of limitations and required several point releases before becoming truly usable, but, at least as far as I’m concerned, it’s what makes XML manipulation tolerable in PHP 5. Without it, we’d be stuck with DOM, which, despite using the same underlying functionality, requires, oh, three times as much code.
Type hinting has, more than once, saved my behind. It took it a couple of minor adjustments (e.g.: allowing passing NULL and supporting arrays) before it became truly useful, but without it we’d have a much poorer language from a maintainability perspective.

Overall, the spontaneity with which PHP has been developed in the past is a combination of sheer recklessness (“I’ll commit and deal with the consequences later”) and a process of discovery that improves what is worth improving, while letting the rest wither (but, unfortunately, almost never die).

The recent discussion about namespaces is a clear example of what is wrong about PHP today: not the endless discussion on internals, not the noise-to-signal ratio, but the fact that someone isn’t willing to just jump the gun, commit and let the chips fall where they may. If we continue down this road, I’m afraid that one day we’ll wake up and find ourselves dealing with the new Java: all decisions made by committee, and innovation dead, somewhere in the corner with no-one to care.

Comments

Very good point!

Cheers!
Toby

The scary thing is: some people (too many, I fear) would consider “PHP as the new Java” A Good Thing. Is it any wonder that PHP is bleeding users to Ruby?

Cloveless… Is PHP bleeding users to Ruby? Iv’e not seen any evidence to support this at all – PHP is still the defacto standard for scripting languages, there are now more and more competant PHP programmers.

Even if PHP is losing users to Ruby if it is – is it due to the noise-to-signal ratio on the PHP internals mailing list? Or because its harder for the developers of PHP to commit maverick patches to CVS and get an idea accepted as part of the PHP core? Highly unlikey.

I have no hard data to back this up, but most of the Ruby and/or Rails using developers I encounter are former PHP coders.

That both Ruby and Rails are largely the result of individual vision and execution is worth noting, as the racket surrounding PHP grows louder and more committee-based.

There is a great deal to be said for the “Benevolent Dictator” approach when it comes to open source. Doesn’t work for every case, but when the opposite takes hold — high noise-to-signal, etc — it oozes out into the larger community in ways that are difficult to measure, but cannot be ignored.

Just because it can’t be measured, it’s unwise to think that the hostile environment surrounding the PHP core has no effect.

For example: let’s say the senior developer a Company X is in the loop on the challenges that come with the “upper echelon” of the PHP world. He finally gets fed up and mandates a switch to Rails. Given his clout, no one objects — and a PHP shop becomes a Rails shop.

Mid-level and junior developers make the switch as well, and if they like what they’ve switched to, tell their friends. And so on, and so on.

The entire community doesn’t have to be exposed to the problematic core. It just takes turning off one influential developer to create 20 Rails converts.

Highly unlikely? I’m not sure. I don’t dispute that PHP continues to be the dominant scripting language, and I’d like to see it continue to hold that position. That said, Rails is picking up its rabid fans from someplace, and I don’t think there are enough ColdFusion switchers to have made this much noise.

It sure seams that somebody is pushing Php further and further towards Java. At first it was OOP, now will come the framework and eclipse and only Java developers know what next. Maybe Zend as the main sponsor in PHP these years wants to reach to a profit fast for it’s investors, and for this they need a complicated high level language. I say that the scripting days of php are long over. Will have to get “certified” asap.

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⇥ Thoughts for a new year: PHP as the new Java

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