Re: WHAT is PHP's vision????

This was a great post, it says what I tried to say but lacked the eloquence with which to say it. Perhaps I am showing my age, but it seems these progammatic style issues are common with developers with less experience. I remember coding assembly language with pencil, hex-code sheet, and paper. In the schools, they do not seem to teach a variety of approaches, but favor, instead, to teach CS-correctness. They teach "the way" code should be structured, instead of how to structure code. Once you have used #2 pencils and cards to write programs, had to reorder a thousand card program which was droped, and used paper tape and glue to debug it, everything else is gravy. Ron Chmara Wrote: > Well, quite an interesting thread, with many side points. > My two cents below, with some side threads of their own. ;-/ > > Rasmus Lerdorf wrote: >> > Of course not. But currently the image for PHP is that it's ONLY >> > meant for web scripting. Even as it can be used in various other >> > places too. >> That has always been our position. "PHP focuses on the Web problem". >> That has been the design roadmap, if you will, from day one. > > A lot of this discussion and debate seems to confuse the problem, > "easily making dynamic web pages", with computer science designs (not > having "private" XXXX is somehow the problem), or architecture > decisions (using persistant XXXX across sessions, or processes, or > whatever), or other ancilary tasks to PHP's core strength. Rather than, > oh, make web pages, much of this discussion (and, it seems, emotion) > was expended *not* on PHP making web pages, but whether or not it did > XYZ that a given programmer thinks is "absolutely essential" for a > given (web) language. [snip] > I, for one, would mourn the day that PHP turned into bloatware > that tried to solve too many *style* preferences. Building dynamic web > pages is the problem, for me, at least. My clients want software, > fast, not some-computing-theorist-approved-way-of-doing-things, or > I-learned-language-xyz-and-I-want-all-languages-to-work-the-same, > or It-should-be-done-this-way-because-of-proper-coding-war, or > it-must-do-this-thingie-this-way-to-be-buzzword-compatible, or > look-at-the-grandeur-of-the-meg-of-include-code. I started using > PHP because it _didn't_ waste lots of my time and energy on such > notions, as compared to ASP, WO, CF, and the like (haven't used > AOLserver or .NET yet, so who knows). It did less silly things, > (complexity=greater bugs) and it was much faster, and easier to > *profit* from, as a result. > > In closing, thanks to all keeping a careful watch on the WTF-meter, and > keeping PHP better than, well, all the other languages I've >suffered through with web-work. :-)