Re: 5.4 again

On Tue, 10 May 2011 15:20:14 +0100, Alain Williams wrote:

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 03:55:26PM +0200, christian.kaps@mohiva.com wrote:

I'm a userland developer, reading the list since two years I think. And I must say I'm totally frustrated about the developing process itself. The actual proposal process is always the same: 1. Someone proposes a new feature. 2. As next there is a long discussion about the topic which ends up with more dissent than consensus.

I think that part of the problem is that we come to the language from different perspectives and so have different needs and use PHP in different ways. PHP is a language that is used by a very wide variety of people, most of who would never think of going anywhere near a mail list like this one. This might mean that we have to accept that people will use PHP in ways that many of us might seem wrong. There is little point in telling them that they should be doing things differently because as far as they are concerned they are doing just fine. An example of this is the procedural/objects paradigm choice. OO is probably better for large projects and is favoured by many on this list. Many PHP users find objects and can probably use them, but almost certainly won't be able to write objects - the programs that they are writing are fine as procedural. So: rather than saying ''OO is the only way'', we need to make life easier for those who will never write OO code. Balanced against that is that you can't put everything into PHP.

Yes, this is the point. In my opinion PHP has an identity problem. Is it an object oriented or a procedural language? I think the best from both worlds seems to be inoperative!