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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 20:27:55 +0100
Message-ID: <CA+_UWzotiJ6NhctiuPVAnrCat1tQXmoAefGPSBLnG1icv8T1Nw@mail.gmail.com>
To: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Voting periods
From: thbley+php@gmail.com (Thomas Bley)

In the past months, I talked to a lot of German companies using PHP or Java:
All PHP companies were using 5.2/5.3 and planned to upgrade to 5.4.
Almost all were using default binaries from their favorite Linux
distribution on their production systems.
Only one was building their own extensions, based on the book from 2006.
None of them complained about missing features or security problems.
None of them complained about quality of PHP or missing documentation
in userland functions.
Those who chose Java did it because of better IDE support, tools for
static code analysis (FindBugs) and the compiler giving warnings (e.g.
code calls non-existing methods).
None of them mentioned they are using or needing a debugger.
Those who chose PHP did it because they want things going quickly and
want cheap programmers without academic graduation.
Those who had performance problems, mainly had a shop framework
producing bad queries.
Most choose a PHP framework because it is the biggest and well-known.
Most did not run automatic tests. Those who did testing mainly did
selenium or unit tests for important functions.
Those who were using Wordpress confirmed they did not look into the
code before using it in production.

Regards,
Thomas


On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 7:22 PM, Matthew Leverton <leverton@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 11:07 AM, Zeev Suraski <zeev@zend.com> wrote:
>> The vast majority of the PHP community is a silent one;  These people
>> ...
>> In fact, they're not completely silent.  They speak in volumes
>> - PHP 5.4 is used in less than 1% of the sites using PHP today, and even
>> the relatively revolutionary 5.3 is still a lot less popular than 5.2.
>> The new shiny features are not all that interesting for most people.
>>
> Can we stop calling things "new shiny features" as if that means
> anything? It's empty rhetoric. When you treat your users like
> unintelligent noobies who are just going to hang themselves when you
> give them a rope, then that's the type of users you will end up with.
> As a long time (silent) PHP user of 10+ years, these are exactly the
> types of features that I and *everybody* I work with as professionals
> who write our own code would like to see in PHP. The second PHP 5.5 is
> out, I'll be updating just to have easy-to-use iterators (i.e.,
> generators).
>
> As somebody who has been actively involved on another large open
> source project for 15 years, I can appreciate the desire to avoid
> adding pointless complexity. In fact, I think putting properties into
> something already in alpha state (5.5) is not wise. But the feature
> itself is spot-on, and to claim that using __get and __set is better
> or sufficient is a hard position to back up.
>
> Pointing to usage of PHP 5.4 as any sort of justification is
> meaningless. What's happening is that the average PHP user is simply
> turning into a person who uses few old, mainstream PHP applications
> like Wordpress because PHP lacks the features to be competitive with
> other languages. So it's things like Wordpress that are driving the
> big numbers, which has nothing to do with the number of individual
> people who write their own serious, modern software.
>
> And for the discussion at hand, yes, it seems obvious that every RFC
> should have an absolute deadline of when voting ends.
>
> --
> Matthew Leverton
>
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