PHP's hope for the future?

[jayboots]

I agree with 90% of your actual arguments, but I think your rhetoric (as in "crying like babies") is completely off. You're the most vitriolic IMHO.

You fail to mention who you're talking about, but to the extent you're referring to me, let me just say that you're arguing against a straw man. You seem to do that a lot. In the other thread, you were coming out of that mode, but now you're back.

Talk about rhetoric... Why would you think I was talking about you? Does the shoe fit? Yes, I'm back to defend what's right. ...and if you read my post and follow internals you would know exactly who I am talking about -- someone who started a rant on the dev list and proceeded the rant with the literal exclamation that they were starting a rant. I'm not being rhetorical, I'm being factual.

..but, Dagfinn, lets not make this personal, okay?

[jayboots]

I think you've missed the point here. I've pointed this out, but I'm not pleading my own case. Nor is it about the troubles of PHP developers or any particular bug or problem. It's about what's communicated and how that will be seen by people who are outside PHP entirely.

I see a deep incongruency between these two:

• The idea that you can't really expect bugs to be fixed in a FOSS project. I think you've expressed this idea and so does the text on bugs.php.net.
• The idea that PHP is being "driven to the enterprise".

I can live with this, but can the "enterprise" people? I could be wrong, but I don't think they will accept the risk that's implied. They will choose instead to pay for software from a company that commits itself to fixing bugs.

BTW, I notice that Mysql has a "tutorial" on bug reporting that's almost identical to the PHP one but skips the part about how few people are fixing bugs and how you should be "excellent" to the bug fixers to motivate them.

Dagfinn, it is you missing the point. People in the enterprise are already using PHP. The PHP bug system and the internals dev list is part of a FOSS project, not a company. MySQL is a product backed by a company. They have paid development staff and they have real clients paying real money for real support. Are you willing to admit that there is a difference between a company and a FOSS project?

Don't be mistaken, I'm going to defend the volounteers for the work they do, not the people who take it upon themselves to smear and rant about the "service" they get (I'm not talking about you with that statement). This is not a vendor/client situation, please understand that.


If you don't have hard facts on the enterprise issue, stop bringing it up. You are just promoting FUD and it isn't even true.

[ethanp]

PHP5 is a great system, and I don't see it lacking. It will be awhile before its adapted on all host, but PHP has been used for so long I don't think that there is a way around it. All of the good/major web forums are used all over the web, and based on PHP.

I am a bit immature, but I still don't like Ruby on Rails. I do PHP for the little money I have, and Rails may one day destroy it.

[Dr Livingston]

You do not get support with Open Source. If you use Open Source, and you expect support, then you have got a hard neck to expect so. Really, you have. You get no support using PHP as it is Open Source.

That is proberly half the battle with people complaints in regards to PHP. Sure, there is a bug here and there, and the people who developed PHP to begin with, are by the developers who use PHP (which is Open Source btw) expected to sort things out.

Well folks, the people behind PHP originally are not your support help desk. They support PHP it's self, and in which future direction it goes. They are only obliged to fix bugs, to help developers, etc.

Here they are taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can, and here are people slagging off (basically) them off for the lack of support. What support huh? Huh?

You don't get support with Open Source, unless of course your prepared to pay for it. That is the whole -BEEP- meaning of Open Source. God. As to the enterprise arguement, that is basically mute.

The enterprise level companies out there today who have opted to use PHP are more than aware of the current flaws of PHP, and they knowingly use PHP fully aware of these flaws.

Do you actually think that a multi-million dollar company venturing into using PHP would not be aware of these problems huh? What planet are you living on. I could go on a bit more, but I need to calm down first...

[swiftone]

WOW!
That's all I can say. I am dumbfounded.

[Sgarissta]

You do not get support with Open Source. If you use Open Source, and you expect support, then you have got a hard neck to expect so. Really, you have. You get no support using PHP as it is Open Source.

That is proberly half the battle with people complaints in regards to PHP. Sure, there is a bug here and there, and the people who developed PHP to begin with, are by the developers who use PHP (which is Open Source btw) expected to sort things out.

Well folks, the people behind PHP originally are not your support help desk. They support PHP it's self, and in which future direction it goes. They are only obliged to fix bugs, to help developers, etc.

Here they are taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can, and here are people slagging off (basically) them off for the lack of support. What support huh? Huh?

You don't get support with Open Source, unless of course your prepared to pay for it. That is the whole -BEEP- meaning of Open Source. God. As to the enterprise arguement, that is basically mute.

The enterprise level companies out there today who have opted to use PHP are more than aware of the current flaws of PHP, and they knowingly use PHP fully aware of these flaws.

Do you actually think that a multi-million dollar company venturing into using PHP would not be aware of these problems huh? What planet are you living on. I could go on a bit more, but I need to calm down first...

You are absolutely correct. Given your arguement, why the disdain for people who choose to leave PHP because they feel the issues that are existant too detrimental for them to work through? I don't EXPECT PHP, or its developers, to never break, or never have problems, or to fix everything or anything I find that doesn't work. But if that list of things that doesn't work for me gets too big, they can EXPECT that I will go find a project that DOES meet my needs.

[jayboots]

I don't EXPECT PHP, or its developers, to never break, or never have problems, or to fix everything or anything I find that doesn't work. But if that list of things that doesn't work for me gets too big, they can EXPECT that I will go find a project that DOES meet my needs.

Right. By-the-same token, no one asked you to use PHP either. Still, the big difference is that if you leave, nether the user or dev communities are harmed (no offence--the same goes for most people including myself). OTOH, if the user community decides to sharpen its claws on the devs causing a dev to burn out and leave then EVERYONE is worse off. In FOSS, users are not equal to devs and never should or will be.

Now here is the rub. The devs do fix bugs. The people who seem to be complaining the loudest have amazingly had their bugs fixed -- by the very people they complain about. They seem to be complaining about process. Yet the process can only be improved by people volounteering to actually do the work required. In "the other thread" I asked if different wording for the status labels would help. No one posted a patch that would effect any change. So if the user community is only interested in saying what the volounteers actually doing the work should do and how they should do it -- well, no one who matters is going to listen. If you want hand holding, talk to a vendor who is willing to provide professional support (you may want to contact IBM, for example, since they are now including PHP). Otherwise I'm sure you will find that all FOSS projects are the same in this regard.

[JaredWhite]

I see this as a sign that PHP is having growing pains. Very understandable, since three major things are happening at once:

PHP 5 is going from "get it working" mode to "get it working well" mode, with the upcoming 5.1 and subsequent fixes. This is probably taking a lot of core developer time away from doing major work on the 4.x branch, which, frankly, is a dead-end technology. We loved ya, PHP 4, but it's time to move on.

Secondly, PHP is getting noticed more and more at an enterprise level, which is putting a lot of pressure on everyone, I imagine. The ol' days of PHP being a simple scripting language used by some Unix geeks is over. It's just dang big and complicated now, and with complexity comes increased development difficulty.

Thirdly, Ruby on Rails is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. I've researched it quite a bit as I've been learning PHP 5 and enterprise design patterns, and the fact is it's a brilliant framework built with an impressive new language. That being said, I'm a PHP guy, love PHP 5, and am not interested in switching to a new language. I've programmed in VB, Objective C, Java, Python, and a little Perl. PHP is still my favorite language, in spite of its warts. I spend time in friends' houses, but I come home to PHP. What needs to happen if the PHP world wants to compete with Rails is this:

Rally around some core PHP frameworks and libraries and build an awesome community around them. I see PEAR playing an increased role as its code quality improves and it migrates to modern PHP 5 OOP code. I also see the number of viable PHP 5 frameworks mushrooming for a time, then collapsing back down into a small number of complementary and well-supported platforms. Don't forget: Ruby is a relatively new language and Rails somewhat came out of nowhere and captured the PR spotlight because of its commercial backer and its tight, well-designed scope. If Ruby had been around for years in the Web developer world with lots of people creating their own varying frameworks, there wouldn't be a single community rallying around a single product.

Anyway, the bottom line is this: PHP is worthy of love, and I'm willing to cut the internals guys some slack. Maybe one guy here and there is out of line, but that's one guy. PHP is a universe of millions of people trying to do some cool stuff on the Web. And I'm sticking with it.

Jared

[jayboots]

@Jared: OT, but Ruby has been in development since 1993 with a first release in 1995.

[myrdhrin]

@Dr Livingston

I don't always agree with your statements (how could I... I'm not you ) but this time you nailed it right one!!!!

[Dr Livingston]

Thirdly, Ruby on Rails is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. I've researched it quite a bit as I've been learning PHP 5 and enterprise design patterns, and the fact is it's a brilliant framework built with an impressive new language.

Ruby at the moment does appear to have some pulling power in the eyes of a lot of developers, but as it has been stated before, it is relatively new, and what worries me is just long it is going to be about, and just how far it is going to go, once the bubble has burst and it starts to lose it's sparkle.

Every other language has had time to mature, be it Java, Python, PHP or Perl. Ruby is brand new and shinny, but very few people know more than what they've seen in the adverts.

Maybe in a few more years, who knows. You can't predict the future.

Secondly, PHP is getting noticed more and more at an enterprise level, which is putting a lot of pressure on everyone, I imagine.

That is because PHP has matured nicely, thank you very much But it's not just due to PHP, but for example the effort from Zend to market PHP as a viable solution to the problems business face.

Maybe one guy here and there is out of line, but that's one guy.

Exactly. One individual expresses his point of view, and immediately there is a witch hunt, and people are gunning for someone to shoot down. Maybe the attacks are personal or not, but that isn't the point.

The point is that the attacks are down to frustration. I get frustrated sometimes, we all do, but it's how we handle that frustration. The earlier remark I made about what Marcus had posted in the blog, I feel that Marcus didn't handle that frustration very well.

He should have found another avenue to channel that frustration, and not publically condemn someone. Marcus is meant to be a professional, well that is not the impression that I have at the moment.

If you have a disagreement with someone at work, do you publically belittle them? Of course not, so why do it on-line? There is absolutely no difference to me in that respect.

[arborint]

I agree with the general premise that bad attitudes are usually not very productive. But the other side is the reality that this is how the dirty laundry gets aired in open source projects. It's not like this is the first time that PHP has gone off the rails slightly. For many of the reasons mentioned here and probably many others, PHP development has gone a little wobbly recently. PHP5 is not happening nearly as fast as they probably wanted. And PHP5 is like this giant billboard advertising all the flaws in PHP4 and PHP in general.

With the talk of PHP6 before PHP5 as taken off you get the impression that they know that PHP5 is perhaps not what it should have been.

Here they are taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can, and here are people slagging off (basically) them off for the lack of support. What support huh? Huh?

The majority of people in the core group work for Zend and Yahoo! It is a bit of a stretch you say they are "taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can." Many, if not all, of these people directly benefit from the success of PHP.

You don't get support with Open Source, unless of course your prepared to pay for it. That is the whole -BEEP- meaning of Open Source. God. As to the enterprise arguement, that is basically mute.

Actually you get great support with open source without paying for it. This forum and PHP are both examples. Do you think the people currently companing about a few things in PHP would have even close to the same effect on Sun or Microsoft developers? In open source the word gets around because most everything is done in public. You might not like the process, but this is one of the ways it works.

The enterprise level companies out there today who have opted to use PHP are more than aware of the current flaws of PHP, and they knowingly use PHP fully aware of these flaws.

Do you actually think that a multi-million dollar company venturing into using PHP would not be aware of these problems huh? What planet are you living on. I could go on a bit more, but I need to calm down first...

But that's not really the point. I think the concern is that those companies either using or looking at PHP will be effected negatively because of the upgrade/BC problems and the spotty maturation of the lanugage.

[JaredWhite]

@Jared: OT, but Ruby has been in development since 1993 with a first release in 1995.

I hate it when I'm corrected. Yep, you're right -- I guess it's more a matter of mindshare. Ruby as a prominent Web scripting language has only become popular in recent times. I had heard of it a few years ago as a general-purpose desktop app-type language, but didn't hear about its Web prowess until the Rails stuff.

[jayboots]

The majority of people in the core group work for Zend and Yahoo! It is a bit of a stretch you say they are "taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can." Many, if not all, of these people directly benefit from the success of PHP.

Bully for them. Most of the people who use PHP also benefit from PHP. There is a difference still: the devs work on PHP because it is useful to them. This is why they can afford to volounteer time. Even if there was no user base, working on PHP would still be useful to them. Well, maybe not all the Zend guys--the thing though is that you can't count other people's money. Even if they get paid to do what they do, they are still working for their employer, not you or I. That doesn't mean they don't want their efforts to help others too; it is fortunate for us that they do. Mainly I think that statements like this don't acknowledge that PHP is a gift to the community.

Actually you get great support with open source without paying for it. This forum and PHP are both examples.

That's not the same thing at all. We have been talking about bug reporting. How many bug reports has this forum resolved? None. This forum is a community onto itself. It does not represent the PHP project itself, neither the dev community and not even the user community in toto.

But that's not really the point. I think the concern is that those companies either using or looking at PHP will be effected negatively because of the upgrade/BC problems and the spotty maturation of the lanugage.

I'm tired of this supposition. People seem to enjoy repeating it but it is FUD plain and simple. Perhaps people want to extrapolate from their own experiences but doing so is hardly scientific.

[arborint]

Bully for them. Most of the people who use PHP also benefit from PHP. There is a difference still: the devs work on PHP because it is useful to them. This is why they can afford to volounteer time. Even if there was no user base, working on PHP would still be useful to them. Well, maybe not all the Zend guys--the thing though is that you can't count other people's money. Even if they get paid to do what they do, they are still working for their employer, not you or I. That doesn't mean they don't want their efforts to help others too; it is fortunate for us that they do. Mainly I think that statements like this don't acknowledge that PHP is a gift to the community.

PHP is a gift to the community from Zend and Yahoo!!!! Hey, give me some of what he's smoking. Maybe Rasmus' and others work in the early days, but not now. There are certainly some traditional open source "volunteers", but most devs get paid to do it.

That's not the same thing at all. We have been talking about bug reporting. How many bug reports has this forum resolved? None. This forum is a community onto itself. It does not represent the PHP project itself, neither the dev community and not even the user community in toto.

I don't recall anyone saying that this forum represents the PHP project. Actually a more realistic description would be this. Most of the people in the core group get paid to work on PHP. The more valuable PHP is, the more they're worth. And the community is giving them all this FREE input. People who contrubute to this forum have given bug reports, passionate design critiques, testing ... all for FREE. They're "taking time out to help the PHP cause the best way they can." Whereas defenders of the status quo are just freeloaders, not contributing anything.

I'm tired of this supposition. People seem to enjoy repeating it but it is FUD plain and simple. Perhaps people want to extrapolate from their own experiences but doing so is hardly scientific.

FUD for you, business reality for me. I have had two clients in the last month say that they would rather use Java and .NET respectively, so I do what they want (less profit though). And to quote one of the IT directors, "What's up with PHP? I hear programmers are bailing on it." Now I assume people have ten, "I want you to use PHP on my project because that PHP Group really has their act together" and "I want to use that exciting, advanced PHP5 technology I keep hearing good things about" stories to share as well.

And I am someone who actively pushes enterprise PHP to big companies. I don't have (much of) a bad attitude. I try not to attack or get personal (ok maybe McGruff every once in a while ). I don't like terms like "cowboy programmers." I have defended PHP when unjustly presented in blogs and forums for many years. I also think it is our responsiblity as members to speak our minds when we think something is not as it should be. And if that rises into a chorus then it gets noticed, things hopefully get fixed, and we all move on.

[Dr Livingston]

I don't recall anyone saying that this forum represents the PHP project.

Nope, you did not, but I too took note, that the pre text was there, from your statement. If the community of these forums want to help provide 'free' support to the PHP developers then I don't have a problem, so long the people who purport to actually helping the developers of PHP do so in a fair and considered manner.

I would imagine that the vast majority of PHP members are adults yes?

I also think it is our responsiblity as members to speak our minds when we think something is not as it should be. And if that rises into a chorus then it gets noticed, things hopefully get fixed, and we all move on.

I'm all for free speech as well, but in moderation. There is making your point, and there is just going way over the top, but if something does come out of this, yes maybe it will do some good, but maybe then again those that took it upon themselves to shelf the PHP developers, I hope the next time, stand back and look at it objectively.

After this though, if you want me to be completely open and honest, the PHP forums for me, will never be the same again. It's like I can't look some people in the eye, as for a lot of people, I thought highly of them, but maybe that ain't the case now.

[bonefry]

Thirdly, Ruby on Rails is a phenomenon to be reckoned with. I've researched it quite a bit as I've been learning PHP 5 and enterprise design patterns, and the fact is it's a brilliant framework built with an impressive new language.

It's not the framework, that's just the buzz. It's the language. I love it and it's what the future should look like IMHO. But it is not a phenomenon, it's just hype. And too much hype is very dangerous. To give an example, I read an article from a proclaimed Java guy stating that RoR is faster than Spring/Hibernate. And reading such an article, you really don't expect Ruby to be 10 to 100 times slower than Java (really, I'm not joking).

Anyway, the bottom line is this: PHP is worthy of love

Well, about the breaking backwards compatibility issue. Although I hated them for doing this, I really love that they had the courage to do it. Because in the Java land, although there are serious flaws in the platform, nobody wants to break backwards compatibility and fix them because there are too many businesses relying on Java. And a time will come when new PHP versions will not make such drastinc changes, but I'm glad it's not now.
Don't like it ? You can always downgrade to an older version.

[dagfinn]

I agree with the general premise that bad attitudes are usually not very productive. But the other side is the reality that this is how the dirty laundry gets aired in open source projects.

Exactly. The alternative is that only people who agree with each other talk together and dig the trenches deeper. This sort of discussion is useful because you get to hear someone else's point of view. Don't underestimate that even if the other person doesn't seem to be listening to you.

However, it can get so inflamed that it worsens the situation. Let me just point out that it's never just one side's responsibility when that happens.

[arborint]

However, it can get so inflamed that it worsens the situation. Let me just point out that it's never just one side's responsibility when that happens.

I agree. It is the responsiblity of all parties to remain civil and at the same time stick with what they believe is right. It's a fine line and a few oversteps need to be tolerated. This is a system that has proven to work, though sometimes painfully slow and messy, and to get the best result because the education of all parties is built into the system.

I have been proven wrong many times in these forums, but the upside for me is that at the same time I have seen the folly of may ways I have been exposed to new and useful ideas about better ways to do things.

[dagfinn]

Talk about rhetoric... Why would you think I was talking about you? Does the shoe fit? Yes, I'm back to defend what's right. ...and if you read my post and follow internals you would know exactly who I am talking about -- someone who started a rant on the dev list and proceeded the rant with the literal exclamation that they were starting a rant. I'm not being rhetorical, I'm being factual.

It's a straight misunderstanding, then. I read "vitriol on internals" to mean "vitriol about internals". I'm not following the internals list. It would have been helpful if you had provided a link or a quote.

As for rhetoric, you did say "crying like babies". I'll assume they provided an mp3 file, then.

[DougBTX]

Well, about the breaking backwards compatibility issue. Although I hated them for doing this, I really love that they had the courage to do it.

This is the bit that gets me, I really want to see the spot in the mailing list archive or the IRC logs where they made this descision. The bit that really gets me with the references, is that they found a set of cases where PHP code caused the potential for a PHP crash, and their fix was to make the language more verbose by requiring temp userland temp variables, rather than fix the original problem internally. Why was that the better trade off?

Any idea what the dates were when they made these decisions? It would be a great help in understanding the situation to be able to piont at the archives and say "look there, that's why it happened". (If that is possible, it would be a great vindication of an open development process - you'd never exect to be able to see that sort of detail in a closed source project.)

Without that clarification, I don't see courage, I see internal bugs which the devs can't fix. And then snubbing outsiders when they question their decisions.

Edit:

No, I take that back. After reading the internals list for a while, it does make sense. And the main problems come from writing PHP0.8 code, the best solution then is to not write PHP0.8 code. Bye bye PHP 4 support, I'm going to start migrating/trimming my code today, rather than trying to support 4 & 5 at the same time.

Douglas

[sweatje]

Any idea what the dates were when they made these decisions? It would be a great help in understanding the situation to be able to piont at the archives and say "look there, that's why it happened". (If that is possible, it would be a great vindication of an open development process - you'd never exect to be able to see that sort of detail in a closed source project.)

Douglas

This might help: http://groups.google.com/group/maili...625abfe3d0383/
I believe it referes to the same decision and covers some of the back and forth that happened.

Here is a quote:

> Does everyone else think that this issue warrants starting a new version
> branch?

There are more issues besides this one. I still have segfaults here but
did not have the time to make a short script out of it. I will do that
very soon.
You know just as well that nobody that runs PHP seriously wants to patch
their version.
We would have no more maintenence tasks, as we don't have to continue
the 4.3 branch.
People don't easily encounter it because of the Zend memory manager
hiding stuff. The segfault is actually just a memory corruption which
can cause other weird results too (like objects changing class on the
fly).
(Not that it is an excuse to do again, but) We've broken binary
compatibility plenty of times in mini releases - it never was a
significant problem before for PHP.
Not fixing it is *not* an option. You fix something that's broken - you
don't leave it broken. That's called responsibility. And no, switching
to PHP 5 is not an option either.

regards,
Derick

[DougBTX]

Thanks Jason, cheers.

[siteartwork]

Well, about the breaking backwards compatibility issue. Although I hated them for doing this, I really love that they had the courage to do it.

o What if they had made the ze1 to the ze2 incompatible? Would you have had benefit through it, or would it have made life more complicated for you.

o What if Zend makes the developing process of ze2 and the coming versions more open? What about a community process in which proposals get released to public and are waiting for submissions, votes etc.? I know there is a community process in the php world, but in my eyes a simple mailing list just doesn't fit this purpose. Take a look at the zend site: News about business related topics, IBM supports PHP, Oracle supports PHP, Zend studio here, enterpise server there. But if you want to know about what's going on on the low level programming you have to fight your way through product descriptions, downloads etc pp.
Do you think it'd be a could idea if zend features a java like community process?

Those questions just came into my mind, so please do not take it as an offense or another php5-sucks topic. I'd like to hear your point of view about it.

[bonefry]

Do you think it'd be a could idea if zend features a java like community process?

Sorry to break this to you. Although I like the way the Java Community Process works, that's not open source. Open source is about freedom, and that includes freedom to make decisions not based on politics. Because, whenever you don't like a decision in the open source world, you can always fork
(I know many of us cannot handle such complexity, but if enough programmers are dissatisfied, it is possible)