Re: The future of PHP

Manuel, I started answering your letter point by point, but stopped, as it wouldn't have gotten us anywhere. I'm sorry if sharing my (IMHO very realistic) estimate of the PHP world seemed like an insult to you or anybody else. Not everything that is done in the PHP world is of good quality. PHP and the various services around it are not magical, and are not free of flaws. It would be scary if it was. I basically said it out loud. Do I appreciate each and every effort made to improve PHP and the community around it? Definitely. Is everything that's done perfect? No. Some of the efforts are young, and will mature. Some are just not that good. Many are great. I'm sorry you fail to understand that this is a tricky business and not black&white, and try to show my points in a very negative light. Talking in theoretical terms is much easier than trying to work with the real-world resources and context, and picking realistic routes. As for the GUI business, I'll repeat what I answered to others on this list, and on other lists, in many occassions. First off, Perl and Python are *NOT* successful GUI platforms. They may be feature complete, they may be very easy to use and develop (I don't use either, so I don't know) but in practice, they're completely negligible in the GUI world. I don't think anybody has a good reason to believe this is going to change in a revolutionary manner. Now, does the fact that I think that hurts the developers of Perl's and Python's GUI bindings? I sure as hell hope it doesn't, and it doesn't, if they're realistic people. I don't see the efforts made in the PHP-GUI front as fundamentally different. It's useful, it's cool, it should be developed and improved, and no, it will not take over the world. About a central resource of PHP sites that has a voting system - I think that's a good idea. You're quite welcome to implement it if you volunteer. www.php.net will happily host it. Zeev