Hi! > Finally, Zeev, you mention the "PHP philosophy" of being a dynamic > language. While that may well be your philosophy, and you have every > right to have it, that has not been the "PHP philosophy" for years, > as seen by all of the type "stuff" that's been successfully added to > the language and gone into widespread use. PHP doesn't have a > coherent philosophy. It is proudly directionless, steered by whoever > happens to be writing code this week. A few years back, Anthony
I don't think that's the case, moreover, I don't think project can exist and bring coherent results useful to the outside world this way. Of course, we do not have "mission statement", but those formal committee-designed ones are a useless baloney in about 99.999% of cases I've seen. There are, however, certain ideas that underly what is and what isn't PHP and why people use PHP and not some other language, and why certain features are done in certain way. Dynamic language has been one of them, but not only. Pragmatism - preference for solutions that deliver maximum value for the users to solutions that adhere to one or another kind of abstract conceptual framework - is another. Low barrier of entry and embracing users not requiring strong theoretical background and extensive training to be productive is another. Paving the walkways and serving the common use case is another. Borrowing concepts proven to be successful is another. There could be a lot of things, and the list would probably differ from person to person, but I am pretty sure "directionless" is not how you properly describe it. > Rightly or wrongly, to speak of "PHP philosophy" as a thing one can > actually reference is simply not possible. I think not only is it possible, it is necessary. I don't think a project can exist as a hodgepodge of code that people randomly graft on whatever they happened to like in the moment. Maybe we have no official Constitution document, but I think we still have some guiding principles that PHP have been following over the years of its history. It doesn't mean everything we have done we have to repeat forever again. Environment changes, people change, community needs change, and something we rejected 10 years ago we may embrace now. That's ok, but this is not the same as being directionless. -- Stas Malyshev smalys...@gmail.com -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
