PanNotes - blog entry - Comments

affordable access to tertiary education

Phillip — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:15:47 +0500

Jamaicans need more affordable access to tertiary education to improve the standard of live, again it may not solve all the problems, but it will reduce the stupidity in our society. Take a look at Cuba, having the lowest crime rate in the world, the Cuban government feed the nation with education. Jamaica don’t worry about what’s ahead. Just go as far as you can. From there, you can see farther

Chevvy Chevvy

J.R — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:58:27 +0500

Wow . Chevvy the writer…lol..never would have imagine that Nesta would have pulled u into his world of cynicism. lol. good one though.

You are belittling the post.

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:36:00 +0500

You are belittling the post. Is it no wonder why children now sit in class and refuse to ask a question because they know that someone will laugh at the question. There is no stupid question and questions were made to be ask. That is the only way to get the answer. Plus may times someone has thought about the same question but was not brave enough to ask the very same question.

Oh Please!

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 03:07:35 +0500

How can you say something like that. There is no such thing as a stupid question. If you do not know the answer, how are you going to know if you don’t ask?

Not to belittle the post or

Nesta Campbell — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:58:07 +0500

Not to belittle the post or just be contrary, I agree with the general sentiments, but there are stupid questions. There is a difference between being uninformed and being stupid.

Just saying :)

Very well said, you go

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:41:00 +0500

Very well said, you go girl. No question is stupid and if you do not know the answer to a question there is nothing wrong.

not so critical, or more critical thena ever?

Nicole Smythe-Johnson — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:15:52 +0500

Just a few comments on your last paragraph there KM. I see what you mean, in terms of the concern for those of us working in the “not so mission critical services.” I think there is another way to look at this though. Marketing, advertising and web development are often mistaken for the “frills” in organizations but this crisis may be just the thing to show the importance of the communications sector. The reality is that though there are real economic problems behind this crisis, much of the fuel that’s been feeding the fire is people’s perception of impending doom, fear is playing a big part in all this. This is the perfect time for people like us to step in, because an important solution to the problem is changing people’s perceptions so that they’ll feel confident enough to go out and take the calculated risks that keep markets healthy. This is a prime example of how important it is to manage perceptions, information and knowledge. And that’s what the “frills” do, you do the business, we’ll help people to know about and think about your business. If perceptions and information had been managed properly in the first place, perhaps much of this subprime business could have been avoided. People thought one thing and the reality was another. Now we’re all paying. So maybe, just maybe, we over here in the “frills” department are an important part of the way out. Anyway, that’s just my two cents.

The absolute beauty of nature

Trinda — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:17:10 +0500

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 20:11:01 +0500

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 05:42:22 +0500

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 20:45:45 +0500

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 22:31:56 +0500

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 20:50:49 +0500

@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 — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 00:17:32 +0500

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 19:32:53 +0500

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.