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Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:21:13 -0600
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Was Reflection annotations reader - We Need A Vision
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 1/9/13 12:09 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> On 01/09/2013 09:45 AM, Anthony Ferrara wrote:
>
>> PHP NEEDS a vision. It needs something to guide development. Not everyone
>> will agree with it. And that's the point. It levels the playing field for
>> contributions and discussions. Rather than every developer playing for
>> themselves and saying "I hope this never happens", it puts it in the
>> context of "I don't believe this fits our vision". Note the difference in
>> tone between them.
>
> The vision has been the same for years. A general purpose scripting
> language with a focus on web development. You are simply saying you want
> the vision to be more specific than that because everyone has a
> different view of what web development means. But even if we narrow the
> vision, it will still be open to a lot interpretation. We try to strike
> a balance between the different and changing views of web development
> the same way we strike a balance between appealing to weekend warriors
> and top-100 trafficed sites. No vision statement is going to answer the
> question of whether annotations should be in docblocks or in the core
> language. That's simply not what vision statements do.
>
> -Rasmus

Sure.  A vision statement won't say "annotations FTW" or "Objects FTL". 
  But it provides a soft metric and rough target toward which to keep 
moving, and we can all subjectively measure proposals against that 
metric, rather than subjectively against our own personal metrics.

As a former member of the Board of Directors for the Drupal Association, 
I feel having a formal visioning process is one of the best things we 
ever did.

+1 to Anthony on needing an actual publicly-documented vision for the 
PHP project.  Even if it doesn't have a BDFL, having some clear standard 
against which we measure the essence of proposals would be beneficial.

--Larry Garfield