Hello Zeev,
Zeev Suraski wrote:
> >If you are going to descriminate sites based on subjective criteria,
> >like matters of taste or points of view that vary greatly from person to
> >person, that is bad because you will certainly leave out contributions
> >that could help greatly PHP and in the end yourself.
> >
> >It would certainly would make you look arrogant if you get to be picky
> >as if including some sites and not others you would be doing somebody
> >else a favor when the promotion that PHP gets from the sites will always
> >benefit you direct or indirectly.
>
> But that's the problem, and that's why I think it's not necessarily a good
> idea. Some people may feel it's arrogant, but it doesn't change the fact
> that some sites may result in PHP's brand going in the opposite
> direction. Because there's no objective criteria and no jurisdiction, we
> won't have ways to avoid this, at least not without causing some people to
> feel very bad.
So what you are going to do about it? Nothing?
If you don't want to risk hurting people just accept as much sites as
you can with a minimum of requirements and along with the Web ring have
a vote facility that lets the user be the judge of the quality of the
sites and then periodically publish PHP content sites rankings by user
votes. I'm sure this will foster the continuous improvement of the
quality of the sites because every site maintainer with an ego will want
to look good in the rankings.
> >If I were you I certainly would not rule out sites with content that
> >overlaps others. Why not accept all sites that provide PHP articles? One
> >site may not be as good or as complete as other today, but they may
> >improve over time enough to be technically better than others that you
> >picked before. What would you do then? Accept what you refused before
> >and then discard what you accepted before? Doesn't seem to be a good
> >idea.
>
> I think that you're forgetting where this whole discussion started. If the
> idea is to make everybody feel good about themselves (which is a viable
> objective on its own) and be as 'fair' as possible, then what you wrote in
> this paragraph and in the two paragraphs before it makes perfect
> sense. But that's not the goal you were talking about. The goal is to
> push PHP, to market it, and to give it a good image. Unfortunately, doing
> the 'nice-to-everybody' thing ('developer-oriented') does not go hand in
> hand with doing the right thing from a marketing perspective
> ('consumer-oriented'). They're not mutually exclusive, not at all, but
> they're definitely not identical directions.
Man, you are not getting my point. The idea to accept as much sites as
you can is to foster a competition between all the sites that can
provide any sort of content to the PHP developers giving a great sense
of support to the users, being either effective users or users in
potential that are evaluating the language and are in doubt about the
support they may get from the PHP community.
Anyway, addressing the potential of PHP promotion originated by PHP
content sites, is only part of needs to be done. You definitely need to
address the media in a way that they provide PHP more exposure.
Not only you need to foster technical article writing, but you also need
to give the media some food that they like, basically "hot news". You
may not give much importance to that, but I thing at least part of the
qualified media would like to hear about hot new extensions that are
available at each release or are under development. This will provide
much page views to PHP in a medium that is not specific of PHP.
> >Anyway, in a Web ring banner you only promote a site at each banner
> >view. I don't see the problem of rotating banners of overlapped content.
>
> The way I see it is that if it's too loose, it's useless. It won't give
> PHP any professional feel or anything. If it's more tight, then we're
> going to have to ensure that the sites are sync'd in terms of avoiding
> duplicate content, that they're all of good quality, etc. This is *very*
> difficult to do in a world which is almost completely based on volunteer
> work. I, for one, don't think we can demand *anything* from PHP community
> site webmasters - whatever they do to help PHP is good, and they should get
> to decide how much and in what ways they're willing to contribute.
What I have written above addresses this challenge. Anyway, there is a
lot more that can be done. You just need to focus on ideas that promote
PHP, hopefully without spending much money, time or any other sort of
effort. In that sense what you need to do is to invest on viral ideas,
meaning ideas that spread by themselves automatically.
About this idea, I recommend this book, if you haven't yet read it:
Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin, former Yahoo marketing
director.
The book is about what is a viral idea and how to create one that will
succeed. The book is freely available in different electronic formats
from here. Give it a try, it is worthy.
http://www.ideavirus.com/
> > > Things like that are usually not that simple, or in other words, they're
> > > easier said than done. If done sloppily, they can have a negative
> > > effect. And doing them correctly requires substantial efforts.
> >
> >You sound bureacratic. You should feel honoured by the extra promotion
> >that all the PHP content sites give you because your business depends on
> >PHP acceptance in the market. Why make it hard for sites that are
> >willing to help you in the end?
>
> Because I'm trying to look at the goal and look how we can try to achieve
> it, and be as realistic as possible about our chances. Using a screwdriver
> to hammer a nail doesn't work, and I think that thinking that this Web ring
> would do the job of marketing PHP is over-optimistic.
I did not say that. I suggested that as one of many things that can be
done and even doesn't cost you much to put in practice.
> Honor has nothing to do with it, and I think it's a great thing that there
> are lots of PHP web sites and a strong community behind it.
Yes, my point is that you are not taking positive advantage of that when
you could for the joy of everybody concerned with PHP.
> >I guess you just say that because you were simply not affected by the
> >major Internet layoffs that happened in the latest months, so you don't
> >seem to have a great idea how bad this has been for so many people.
> >
> >Of course the Internet is not gone. It just happens that the number of
> >companies with business depending on it was drastically reduced. So,
> >there aren't so much employment and business opportinities as before.
> >That's what I mean.
>
> I'm quite aware of the serious slow down, I'm in the hi tech industry as
> well, remember? :) It doesn't change the way the Web's future looks as a
> medium. There was serious hype that caused a big balloon of hot air, which
> blew up. But the medium itself was not hurt. Apart of the .COM world,
> which wasn't making any money anyway, the internet infrastructure is still
> being used just as extensively as it was, and I think that in the long run,
> it'll continue to grow.
What I am saying is that the Internet market was the largest part of the
PHP market. Most of the corporate market uses Microsoft stuff because
they deal with money by definition and it is very hard to make it
believe that something does not cost money and hardly ever appears in
the media so it doesn't get enough exposure to be credible. If you keep
refusing to believe this, I'll rest my case.
> >I don't think the actual PHP for command line features matter. My point
> >is that people get it wrong. What is it that you can do on Perl in the
> >command line that you can't do with PHP? Nothing relevant, it is that
> >people hardly can concieve PHP as a command line scripting language
> >because PHP is not known nor advertised as a capable language to work
> >that way. That is what needs fixing: people's misconceptions. That's
> >fixable with targetted marketing.
>
> I don't think that's even a problem, and it's not as if we have so many
> marketing resources we should be looking for new fronts to fight :) PHP is
> looking at a serious up-hill battle if it tries to market itself as a
> general purpose language. If we market it as a Web platform, it's an
> established solution (which still needs work). If I get to 'pick my
> fights', I'd go for the 2nd one any day.
> As I previously said, as things work in the opensource world - if people
> start working on different angles, there's nothing to stop them. But as
> far as the core project is concerned, I'd be very wary of losing focus.
It is your bet. If you are convinced that is the winning bet, I am
wasting my time here.
> >Man, give it some time! How long was it since Andrei released PHP-GTK?
> >How old is PHP now?
>
> These aren't the right questions in my opinion. PHP was around when the
> Web started growing rapidly, in 1997-8-9. The GUI market, on the other
> hands, started booming in the early 90's. In my opinion, it's pretty much
> a lost battle - there are established solutions which are much better than
> PHP in this area.
Go and tell that to Perl and Python developers.
> >I think it is amazing the some how unexpected uses that people find for
> >PHP. What really confuses me is that instead of making that "use cases"
> >to promote PHP, you simply raise a lot of objections as if that would
> >cause any harm to PHP. Come on, enjoy all the PHP users applications
> >because they certainly help you to make the proof of concept that PHP is
> >the right choice for so many people.
>
> That's my main point of disagreement. It would be quite cool to find some
> day that my fridge has PHP built into it, but let's be realistic about it -
> do we have the power and resources to do this? My answer is a definite
> 'no', and I think that if we try doing this, we'll lose what we already
> have - which is a *strong* Web platform.
You don't have to develop anything about it, you just need to make them
use cases to show the power of PHP.
> >Useful? How can you reckon them as useful if you insist on neglecting
> >them?
>
> What do you mean insist on neglecting them?
It seems that you are embarassed of showing that PHP can be and is used
for non-Web programming. Non-Web programming can be complimentary to Web
programming. PHP Web applications can have nice GUI installing programs
also written in PHP, but your position make it sound like as if it is a
sin to do non-Web programming with PHP.
> If you mean that in a presentation that I may do about PHP to an audience
> of possible users, I would define PHP as a 'Web platform', then yes, I'm
> neglecting it. But if I pitch it as the 'Language that would change your
> life!!!', my chances of convincing them are slim.
You don't have to lie or pretend PHP can be used for things that nobody
use for. You just have to present real world use cases which also
include non-Web programming. That would help you to impress any
PHP-unaware audience about PHP power.
> >One other thing, I don't know if you notice, that but every time you
> >neglect these unexpected uses of PHP you are somehow ruling out people
> >behind them. That's a serious thing because you are eventually hurting
> >people's feelings when that worked so hard to use the language that you
> >developed. If people are making a private use of their work and could
> >not care less if their work is reckoned, that is not a problem. But
> >sometimes you see people working so hard with recognition as their main
> >goal. Neglecting that recognition or making it very hard is terrible. I
> >don't thing you want those people to give up for the lack of
> >recognition, don't you?
>
> As I said earlier in this letter, making people feel good about what they
> do doesn't always go hand in hand with what would keep PHP alive for the
That's sensitive! Are you just a techie that only cares about the
technology that you develop, or are you a real person that is happy with
the work that real world users put up front eventually helping you to
promote PHP?
> years to come. It all depends what our goal is. If it's to try and keep
> PHP on the cutting edge, then we have to go in a certain path. If our goal
> is to make everybody happy, at the price of seeing PHP lose focus, become a
> super-market of 'everything goes', inevitably losing market share and
> eventually dying, it's another. These two are extremes, and we should do
> our best to find the path in between. As much as you tried to establish
> this in your letters, I haven't seen a good solid reason to believe that
> what you suggest is going to secure a better future for PHP, or even going
> to increase the chances of success for it. Your analysis of the situation
> assumes that in our current situation, we have nothing to lose. I see this
> very differently - I think that if we change directions without carefully
> thinking about the possible consequences, we have *TONS* to lose.
These sound just like excuses to not agree with what I am suggesting.
Never mind, I am used to this. I even do not take it personal.
> >You're welcome, but you just skipped the implicit million dollar
> >question: will there be an affordable version of Zend encoder that
> >developers can buy for USD$100 like they can with VB or Delphi? :-)
>
> The current Encoder pricing is quite affordable (people on this list didn't
> even agree with me that $50/month may be too high, but it's definitely not
> unaffordable). Unlike VB or Delphi, where you *cannot* develop unless you
> buy these products, with PHP, things are very different. You can develop
> whatever you want, and only if you distribute your application *and* don't
> want to give out the source code (which almost always means you're selling
> it), you should consider getting the Encoder. $50/month is not a lot, and
> we're definitely not going to offer it for $100/perpetual. We do, however,
> look into different ways of offering this functionality in different ways
> to different audiences, but nothing has been decided as of yet.
I don't want to interfere with your business model. If you can make a
living from it, for me it is just fine. That's sincerely what I always
wished for you: commercial success. Still that won't attend the needs of
most of the PHP users.
Regards,
Manuel Lemos
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