2007/12/26, Colin Guthrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Hi, > > While I'll admit I've not fully read your mail due to it's relatively > in-depth and technical nature that I'm not really up-to-speed with > regarding the internals of PHP, it did strike me when skimming the mail, > that you've not really covered your personal standpoint now. > > You state some interesting technical about how namespaces and such > will/could work in 5.3 (something which I would personally welcome with > open arms (especially as I've coded around the autoloading issue with > other techniques involving regexps of class names and other such > slightly nasty things (although acceptable if you used good prefixes on > all your class/interface names)). > > But you also say you're leaving PHP (if not for good, at least for now) > and you don't really say why, other than referring to the hard initial > entry to the internals community. > > If you would be so kind, I think it would be interesting to say why you > have decided to move away from using PHP (and what you are now intending > to use!). I think it would help the PHP community grow stronger with > this kind of information as much as the technical information you've > already given.
Well, it was my intent not to say that in particular because is rather personal. I just wanted to pass on all the things that may be of some use to another developer. If you must know, there are three reasons why I'm distancing myself from PHP. 1) I'm tired of web development as a whole. Too many clients which do not understand what the web is. Too many opiniologists who should know what the web is but talk about a second web, which is nothing more than the old web with logos on shiny floor. It feels like the bubble all over again (luckily I was too young to be affected when the first happened, now I cannot say I won't be affected). 2) I started in the business of software development with a dream that I was told afterwards it was childish and immature. Now I've learned enough to know that my dream, being a game developer, it's neither childish nor immature, totally the opposite, it's probably the most serious and important job in the whole software development industry. I wanna give it a try chasing that rainbow. 3) I'm not so sure anymore if PHP is profitable as a language choice for web development. The small and medium projects market is becoming infested with developers who I cannot compete anymore in terms of cost, and software quality is something this market did not yet got a grasp on. Big projects market has scalability requirements that aren't easily met on PHP grounds, and if it does, the cost is code quality or performance, two things that this market doesn't easily overlook. Right now, the future of web development is mostly uncertain, too many things are happening too fast. If I had to I would bet on Java for server technology and Flash for client technology. The performance of Java6 have left PHP and the many other scripting languages panting for air way way behind. And its scripting API has engulfed all the good things about scripting languages into its domain. And yet the most important thing about Java is its scalability. Let's be honest, how can anyone expect to beat Sun in its own turf (networking)? Anyway, PHP developers, remember this word: "Quercus". And the Flash guys pulled a rabbit out of the hat and called it Flash 9. They broke every compatibility known to developers, but finally developing for Flash doesn't suck. And also, they are going with the open-source approach as the Sun guys did (I pity the poor graphic designer, he still has to get a commercial license to author some content for the flash environment). And we have now many tools to apply the AJAX technique and DHTML easily, but I would still beat the crap out of anyone who thinks that building a thick client on HTML DOM and javascript is a good idea. On the other hand, there hasn't happened anything important on the PHP frontier, except for the PHP4 EOL and the Zend Framework (IMHO the first real framework for PHP). And the most annoying thing is this stupid marriage PHP/MySQL that keeps on going. The moment was appropriate for PHP to end this relationship and PDO was a good step towards this. You'll probably have heard or will soon hear about mysqlnd, and many will think "yay! mysql functions are again part of the core!!! and they're faster!!!" and I would be thinking "damn! open source php projects will be tightly tied to MySQL, AGAIN!". Anyway that was much of a rant. The short version is "I liked the php development market because it was safe, but now I doubt its safety". That's all. I don't think that rant may be of use to anyone, but at least it felt nice to let go of some steam. Best Regards and Happy New Year, Martin Alterisio
