PanNotes - Comments

The absolute beauty of nature

Trinda — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:17:10 +0000

It is always an “earth shattering” experience when one can see the beauty in such an event. Humbling, if nothing more, but wonderful to see that your spirit is still as strong as the storm itself.

Re: Nice looking out

Marc — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:11:01 +0000

They are currently selling the accelerator as a part of their Zend Platform PS product. But if they continue to keep their implementation proprietary they will end up competing APC, which is open source and scheduled to be included in PHP6. That is not a good position to be in.

The math question is a simple CAPTCHA to keep out comment spam.

Nice Looking out

Madhacker — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 00:42:22 +0000

Thats really an interesting article indeed maybe they saving the accelerator as add on or something for us to buy at a later date.

Going off topic here (whats with the math question lol)

general purpose?

owen — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 15:45:45 +0000

what? why would you want php to be general purpose? it isn’t, what are you arguing about? C++ is probably the only high level, widely use general purpose programming language. Every language has their niche and reason for being. There is no one solution for every problem and a IDE does not a language better than another make.

A little more specific

Marc — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:31:56 +0000

Kyle sez:

That being said, the comment about good developers being able to pick up a language in two months is accurate.

No arguments here.

Kyle sez:

As for 2007 being the year for PHP, that seems doubtful. It’s already big, and would have to get so much bigger for that statement to be true.

Ok, let me qualify what I mean by “the year of PHP”. Keep in mind that the context of the original discussion was an informal conversation with varying definitions of success and failure being used. I guess for a wider audience some more specifics are in order; However I am not going to try and conjure up some super specific stats or predictions because I frankly don’t know/trust the “popularity” numbers and I have no idea what Google plans to do (I sure hope they don’t plan on using any interpreted language runtime to replace their existing indexing and query execution architecture). On to the specifics:

When I (misleadingly) say 2007 will be the “year of PHP” the focus for me is mostly the important milestones that Zend will achieve in 2007 to ensure PHP’s continued prosperity (PHP6, IDE, Framework, Partnerships). I think PHP’s popularity would have continued to grow in anyway 2007 based on existing momentum but I think this will be the year PHP crosses over to become a long distance runner.
Contrary to Kaiton’s beliefs, I think that as more companies begin to expose their “business process” to the web PHP usage will increase rather than decrease. I expect to see Ruby and Python to be popular amongst web focused startups but I expect the vast majority of organizations will choose PHP and a lot of that will have to do with the company standing behind it.
I expect the IDE and framework to see good adoption in the 2007/2008 timeframe (not going to make guesses about millions of downloads). This will be significant because it will mean (a) traditional PHP coders are embracing better practices and (b) “mainstream” (.Net and Java) programmers are using PHP.
I expect Zend to do very well financially and get a few buy out offers in 2007/2008. A large part of this will be due to support contracts for Zend Core and license fees for the Zend platform.

I doubt these predictions are sufficiently “SMART” for Kyle’s tastes, but if I said anything else I would just be making it up. My overarching prediction is that Zend will change the corporate (and by extension the overall) perception of PHP from a quick and dirty hobbyist tool to a powerful, reliable, supported product, in a similar vein to what RedHat (and IBM) did for Linux and what MySQL AB is doing for MySQL Server.

Responses

Nesta Campbell — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:50:49 +0000

@owen

Most of the people who complain about PHP are people who can’t code or use a dos prompt.

What?

Anyone who knows anything about PHP knows that as a general purpose programming language it falls short. No one can argue the virtues of PHP as a web programming language. The point is that as most developers/companies move most of their services to the web they need languages that can tie to their backend processes without much hassle or better yet use the same language for the backend as the frontend. Some may argue that with web services this is a none issue but that is another debate.

@Kyle

…and those who return to it after trying and not liking other languages.

Yet to see this happen but I see your point.

…it would seem PHP is not going away anytime soon.

Agreed. People still program in COBOL.

…developers should concentrate more on being good developers, and less about the future of their language of choice.

I wish more people got this. But if we are to believe the Lisp or functional purists the language you program in actually has an influence and the quality developer you become.

One of the advantages that PHP holds are the available tools that are built using it. Majority of them are opensource and if you want to modify/customise you will need to know PHP.

Good post and good comments.

Kyle — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 19:17:32 +0000

Good post and good comments.

No matter how many developers leave PHP in favour of another language/application development framework, there will be those who are comfortable with it and won’t leave it, new developers who pick it up and like it, and those who return to it after trying and not liking other languages.

IMO, how long PHP will be around is (for the mathematicians) some formula which considers the above, and combines the future of expected improvements. Even with conservative estimates, it would seem PHP is not going away anytime soon.

That being said, the comment about good developers being able to pick up a language in two months is accurate. No matter how many languages you are comfortable with, if, for whatever reason, you have to make the switch to another, you should be able to. In general, unless you’re working with something really obscure, developers should concentrate more on being good developers, and less about the future of their language of choice.

As for 2007 being the year for PHP, that seems doubtful. It’s already big, and would have to get so much bigger for that statement to be true. With the realtive attractiveness and, in some cases “well established-ness”, of the alternatives, it’s unlikely that we’ll see such a migration to PHP that we will be able to say that 2007 is/was the year for PHP.

And what would have to happen to make it “the year of PHP”? The “achievements” that would have to be made in the PHP space for that to be true are unclear. What might be a more reasonable prediction is that in 2007 more new developers will chose PHP over any other language, or more developers will switch from other languages to PHP, or Google Search will switch to PHP. Make a “SMART” prediction and check the results in 2008.

Most of the people who

owen — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 14:32:53 +0000

Most of the people who complain about PHP are people who can’t code or use a dos prompt. The same people who can’t code in C++, complain about C++ leave PHP alone, find another programming language to vent your ignorance on.

Is this a php based

Nesta Campbell — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:14:08 +0000

Is this a php based blog?

What’s that suppose to mean? :D

Drupal powered to be

Marc — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 19:10:34 +0000

Drupal powered to be precise.

Just wondering. Is this a

David Bain — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:25:40 +0000

Just wondering.

Is this a php based blog?

Nice references. Good post

Nesta Campbell — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 23:19:04 +0000

Nice references. Good post overall.

First a clarification. Drupal is the only good thing that came out of PHP that I’ve used and by used I mean work with at a low level.

Now…

an un-biased PHP user

Does not exist. :)

The problems with PHP are well documented and I won’t go into them here. PHP’s main challenge at the moment is trying to curtail the number of developers leaving the language for a more comfortable environment compared to the number of persons learning the language. Gone are the days when the first (web) language a developer learned was PHP. The alternatives are becoming a lot more accessible and accessibility was one thing PHP had going for it. PHP being ubiquitous will no longer be an issue.

web programming will be dominated by more experienced programmers

Agreed. And they generally don’t like PHP. People using RoR knockoffs such as CakePHP will soon realise that the effort it takes to get things done with the knockoffs would be much better spent working in the environment they are trying to imitate. Ironically most of these frameworks (Django, Rails) were built out of a frustration of using PHP.

PHP’s good enough status just won’t be able to cut it anymore. I can’t speak to Corporate and their backing of PHP. Companies like Yahoo! and Digg that chose PHP as their primary web development language usually have highly skilled (PHP) developers working for them, this does not reflect the general landscape of web developers. I mean Yahoo! has the creator of the language working for them! (Same goes for Google and Python). Developers like these may not need protection from shooting themselves in the foot but the average web developer certainly does.

Will PHP still be around 5 years from now? Unfortunately yes. My dream of PHP dying a quick painful death won’t happen anytime soon. According to this article the demand for PHP programmers actually grew in 2006 and will continue to do so this year (being part of the Drupal community I’ve actually been witnessing this first hand).

Job security is a good reason to know PHP but I can’t think of another legitimate one at the moment. The fact of the matter is PHP is going nowhere for now but its usage will surely drop over the next two years, by how much I don’t know.

With that being said; I don’t hate PHP (really), my preferences just lie somewhere else.

One more thing. The point that a developer is more likely to know PHP than Python or Ruby is only valid to an extent. As I’ve said a few times, any developer that is not able to pick up a new/better language within a short period (apprx. 2 months) of time isn’t worth the chair he/she sits on. See here for the journey of one of the many developers switching from PHP to Python.

Cheers!

Can only hope that it will

Nesta Campbell — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 23:04:17 +0000

Can only hope that it will be bring an increase in the number of companies that actually offer sensible on-line transactions. Hopefully it will at least lead to better offerings from the local banks when it comes to merchant accounts.