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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Ruminations on PHP 5++
From: larry@garfieldtech.com (Larry Garfield)

On 1/24/14 2:41 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> On 1/24/14, 12:27 PM, Rick Widmer wrote:
>> On 1/24/2014 1:14 PM, Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
>>> PHP is and should remain:
>>>
>>> 1) a pragmatic web-focused language
>>> 2) a loosely typed language
>>> 3) a language which caters to the skill-levels and platforms of a wide
>>> range of users
>>
>>
>> Please don't forget
>>
>> 4) a template system for generating dynamic web pages.
>
> I would categorize that under "web-focused", but yes, hopefully that
> part goes without saying.
>
> -Rasmus

Something else we should be thinking about is that "web focused" has 
been changing.  When PHP 5 came out, the web still consisted almost 
entirely of request-response-end workflow, which PHP does very well. 
However, "web focused" now needs to deal with websockets, server-sent 
events, asynchronous IO, HTTP 2 (persistent connections and multiple 
responses for a single request), "lots of small callback requests" and 
other things where PHP, or at least mod_php, is not well suited at all. 
  The "shared nothing, every request is its own world" has a lot of 
benefits, but also limitations.

(The folks over at ReactPHP / Ratchet, for instance, have had to 
re-implement a ton of libraries to make them async so that they can do 
async logic, which has huge performance benefits if done properly.)

I do not want to turn this into another threads debate, but we probably 
should consider if better general support can be given for 
less-traditional models, which are becoming more common for the web.

--Larry Garfield