At 05:05 PM 6/1/2002, Sebastian Bergmann wrote: >Marko Karppinen wrote: > > It seems to me that PHP is increasingly being modeled for a largely > > imaginary audience of purists. I say imaginary because I just can't > > see how droves of purists would've become involved with PHP in the > > first place. > > I don't want to see changes (like those you mention later in your > posting) in PHP to attract new users, but more to bind people that > already use PHP, but are about to "outgrow" it. > > If you (and others) want PHP to stay at the "BASIC for the Web" level > forever - fine, but spell it out clearly. Otherwise people who are > waiting for PHP to evolve beyond that will become more and more > frustrated.
That's a big twist of this view. If evolving means that PHP will no longer address the beginners' market, then yes, I don't think any of the original authors want it to 'evolve'. That is not, however, what we're talking about. PHP can, has, and will address multiple userbases, beginner, intermediate and advanced. We should go on doing our best to improve it in all fronts, because except for psychological problems, one doesn't necessarily affect the other. It may come to you as a surprise, but there are lots of advanced users who don't enjoy downloading and building, and prefer to see stuff working out of the box. There are the ones who admire downloading, configuring and building each of their apps, and then there's the rest of the world who gets the same job done in a fragment of the time by downloading an RPM or an InstallShield archive. It's a free world, and we should not try to educate it. Zeev -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
