On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 4:46 AM, Rasmus Lerdorf <ras...@lerdorf.com> wrote: > On 09/11/2013 05:34 PM, Florin Patan wrote: >> - lack of a clear roadmap: as I said earlier, can someone really tell >> what's in the next two versions of php from now > > That's never going to happen. We don't have paid developers that we can > assign tasks to. We have volunteers who work on things they need or find > fun to work on. We can't possibly provide a solid road map two (I assume > you mean major) versions out. > > The process is clearly described here: > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/releaseprocess > > When it comes time to do the next release we look at the state of the > various projects/rfcs and we, led by the released manager, decide which > features are far enough along to go into that release. Saying that a > certain feature will be in a release 2 years from now without knowing > whether the person championing it will still be around just isn't > realistic. Plus interesting ideas come up all the time, and a solid > 2-year road map would mean there would be at least a 2-year delay on > anything new. > > We do have a fuzzy road map in the form of the set of RFCs on the wiki. > A subset of those are likely to be in the next release. And to influence > that, instead of writing lots of long email threads on internals, > contact the author of the RFC you are interested in and ask them if they > need help with anything. > > And yes, even very complete RFCs may still get shot down for a number of > different reasons. PHP is quite mature, and major new features are going > to face a lot of friction. This is not a bad thing. I often wish that > some of the things I put in years ago had had a bit more friction. But > there was nobody around to provide that friction. Now we have the luxury > of a lot of experienced people with a wealth of ideas and opinions to > provide this friction. > > -Rasmus
I fully agree with you, every thing that goes in a programming language that is used at this scale should be properly verified / checked / questioned before saying: yes, merge it. But at some point this friction leads to people saying things that are not true about the internals or contributors / potential contributors to leave. The later is even worst given the fact that there's only a dozen or so, iirc, of stable core contributors. New comers will see this as a bad place instead of trying to understand why that happened as it's easier to see the negative side that the cause or the positive side. Below is my personal experience so far and why I started this. The mentality I see in the companies / people that are using PHP is that they long passed the stage where they need a simple website / presentation platform. If we look at the ecosystem right now, we have: - Wordpress: used from blogs to presentation websites to simple personal shop sites. Could improve on architecture / code but it's already too huge and too late to do it without burdening the users with endless hours of changes - Magento & co. for the sales part, which could again improve on architecture but it's a work in progress with Magento 2 iirc, again, big people lots of stores using it - Drupal & rest of CMS software that are better built and people turn to them to build more 'professional'/corporate websites - custom sites / applications / backends : most of the career I've been doing just that so I know a thing or two here. People expect things to go fast, be clean, bug free and be developed in a blink of an eye, if possible. Apps here are long gone from the simple presentation website, Wordpress style blogs, Drupal or Magento setups. - frameworks, ORMs and other tools: the land that's supporting most of the above eco-system. Be it a in-house framework or Zend Framework 2/Symfony2/... they all get bigger and bigger, add more things that users need to build all of the above. They need to be fast, easy to understand, bug free, lightweight and so on. - people who are not in any of the above sections: that's something that I can't speak of, I don't really have contact with things out of the above points, please help out with use cases. As for people who work in those ecosystems and their requirements / expectations: - when you start with something simple PHP is a great tool. You can actually code in a couple of hours something that's displayed on interwebs - then you move to do a small website, non-profit. PHP is still a good tool. - as the site evolves into something bigger: you get into already built systems, Wordpress / Drupal or even frameworks. PHP starts to okish - if you go business/selling you go Magento / similar and you start require more things from PHP, still okish - if the business/site you're working on grows bigger and bigger it's time for a custom solution. It requires time, skills and PHP starts to show it's uglier sides - then you go frameworks which help you build all of the above: there's thing you want to do, users expects from you but if you do them PHP can really slow you down either in development or even worst, in speed. When you start having a slow framework, nobody new will use you anymore, and people will look for something else which in turn will become slow again. I'm not saying always make framework people happy and everyone will be happy but unless you're working with legacy code which hasn't seen the light of PHP 5 ever, chances are your code will use a framework. >From the definition of PHP http://php.net/manual/en/intro-whatis.php we get that PHP is a "general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development". Web development has shifted a huge deal since 200x. I dare to say, it shifted a lot from 2011 even, with the emerge of new framework wave. It took them about 1-2 years to come out and use namespaces and so on but they also added a great deal of new ways to think / write code for PHP developers. Granted, I've been changing around jobs a couple of times in the past years but it's all based on what I've seen in companies that range from small to big, from nation wide number one online store to multi-country stores to worldwide mobile applications. And yes, internals are very friendly when it comes to helping people out, I'll say it again, I haven't see someone asking a question and not receiving at least one answer but when it comes to changes to the language.. that's another story. That's why I think it's the time to reevaluate the priorities in PHP, how it communicates itself to the world and have a clear mission in mind. Granted, having a roadmap is a hard thing, especially with non-payed contributors to the language but we might just as well as a call for vote on the reasons why companies that are using PHP don't provide more help to core. There's a bunch of conferences where people attend, companies send their employees that we could use as a reference. We could use php.net to gather more input from them. And yes, I'm not in a position where I could do this, mainly because I haven't gain some random e-pen standard that people are using to choose if they listen to people or not but I'm sure that there are members here who could make their voice heard on these matters and I'll be helping out each idea that comes out and needs help as best as possible to the extent of my skills. Kind regards ---- Florin Patan https://github.com/dlsniper http://www.linkedin.com/in/florinpatan -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
