"Rowan Collins" wrote in message news:56dea829.5030...@gmail.com...
Tony Marston wrote on 08/03/2016 09:51:
a
"Rowan Collins" wrote in message news:56dd64f5.5010...@gmail.com...
Tony Marston wrote on 07/03/2016 09:14:
That takes brains and discipline, something which appears to be lacking
in the PHP community.
[...]
just because some numpty decides
[...]
groups of competent professionals and not an army of chimpanzees.
Please try to refrain from personal insults.
That was not a personal insult as it was not aimed at an individual
person. I was borrowing from the saying that "if you put a million
typewriters in front of a million chimpanzees they will eventually
produce the works of Shakespeare"
Regardless of the exact definition of "insult", you are repeatedly
questioning people's competence, professionalism, and intelligence;
If you read those "insults", which were pretty mild as insults go, you
should see that none of them was aimed at a single person, so cannot be
described as "personal".
Those who advocate the removal of long-standing features of the language FOR
NO GOOD REASON, thus causing BC breaks which cause havoc to the millions of
userland developers, need to have their competence, professionalism, and
intelligence questioned. Forcing their personal preferences onto the entire
PHP community and breaking countless numbers of applications FOR NO GOOD
REASON is something to be frowned upon and avoided.
this is not a productive approach to a debate. So again, I would invite
you - and others on this thread - to step back and put the emotion to one
side.
Clearly, there is a difference of opinion, and that difference probably
isn't going to go away by repeating the same points in different words, so
let's try to think of productive ways forward.
You have mentioned stability as a good aim, and have given the examples of
COBOL and UNIFACE which we might learn something from; Richard has
mentioned that lack of consistency being a frequent criticism of PHP. Is
there some way we can formulate a policy, based on experience elsewhere, of
how to balance those two aims?
Every language I have ever worked with has had its fair share of quirks and
inconsistences, but competent developers learn to live with them. Besides,
lack of "consistency" is very hard to measure as it is purely subjective and
not objective. You have to first identify with what you are trying to be
consistent, and then to what level.
You could say that having function names which don't start with the letter
"B" are inconsistent.
You could say that having function names which don't all have 13 letters are
inconsistent.
You could say that having function names which don't all start with a verb
are inconsistent.
You first have to define what is "consistent" and what is not, and that will
be a difficult exercise as different people will have different opinions,
just as there is agreed definition of "perfect" and "pure" and "best".
I think that the PHP language developers should have a policy that no
feature or function can be removed from the language UNLESS it is proven to
cause either security or performance issues. They can add new features for
whatever reason without forcing me to use them, but they should leave all
existing features alone. There is a difference between improving the
language and destroying it.
Anyone who does not like the way that PHP works should be told to switch to
a language that they DO like. The millions of developers who have been using
the language for the past decade or so and who have made PHP the #1 language
for the internet DO NOT LIKE their language being broken.
--
Tony Marston
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