On Mon, Oct 7, 2019 at 5:21 PM Olumide Samson <oludons...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 7, 2019, 9:20 PM Claude Pache <claude.pa...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Le 7 oct. 2019 à 22:06, Olumide Samson <oludons...@gmail.com> a écrit > : > > > > > > What's the goal of PHP? > > > > One important goal is (like many programming languages) to get work done. > > > I disagree, coz this seems to be a goal cooked up by you(even if I might > believe in the general idea of that goal, I still can't believe it until I > see where it was outlined). > I think the PHP web-site[1] supports Claude's statement: "PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development. Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world." The adjectives used: - General-purpose - Fast - Flexible - Pragmatic The last one, pragmatic, applies to Claude's point. Various definitions of pragmatic include: - "solving problems in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist now, rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas, or rules" [2] - "of or relating to a practical point of view or practical considerations." [3] - "involving or emphasizing practical results rather than theories and ideas" [4] With respect to Mark's proposal, deprecating back-ticks: maybe it's more pragmatic to have a single, well-defined, and obvious way to invoke an external process. Sure, yet PHP isn't just "pragmatic". It's also flexible and general-purpose. Flexible is the opposite of rigid, meaning there are circumstances where a second way, or even a third way, may provide more practical utility than the single canonical interface. General-purpose means a language is useful in many ways. PHP while "especially suited for web-development" is also useful as an ad-hoc shell scripting language and, in that context, back-ticks are welcomed. If we take back-ticks away, we hobble the "quick-scripting for personal use" flexibility in favor of the enterprise-grade "distributed development, high code-reuse and review" architecture. That seems to run counter to the nature of PHP. [1]:https://www.php.net [2]:https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/pragmatic [3]:https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pragmatic [4]:https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/pragmatic
