Zend Taking PHP In the Wrong Direction? 155
dvanatta writes "Is Zend taking PHP in the wrong direction? Ian Felton asks 'Why is PHP become more like Java, when the PHP developer community seems to
want anything but that to happen? What is Zend thinking?'" From the article: "Data from a Zend survey completed in June 2003 (when PHP5 was still in major development) showed that the characteristics of the PHP community didn't necessarily match up with what was developed in PHP5. For example, with the ability to list three primary programming languages, only 18% of respondents named Java."
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Popular direction != right direction (Score:5, Insightful)
People who think HTML is a programming language really have no business setting the direction of PHP.
Re:Bad writing (Score:3, Insightful)
Neways ya PHP is nothing like Java. I've been using it for 7 years and if they mean by OOP that its more like java then they aren't too clever because PHP isn't making OOP the required way of programming or anything. They are simply providing people with more options to program and they still allow people to choose what they want. People still find OOP scary it would seem and although there are arguments for an against it, I think its up to the individual if they want to use it and that seems to be the way the PHP development is taking it.
Re:Popular direction != right direction (Score:2, Insightful)
Zend wants to make money? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reality check: "Mainstream developers" are people who a) pay nothing to use the software and b) have no product alliegiance whatsoever.
People are using PHP because it's useful and it's free. But being free doesn't help Zend in any way. They're changing the direction of the product slowly so that they'll eventually make some profit off of either PHP itself or PHP-addons using their server language / server engine.
My Philosophy: Unless you're paying for a product, or actively developing for the product, don't bitch when the people who *do* need money because they're the ones making the product decide they want to change it.
By the way, I use PHP quite a bit, and haven't really noticed that much of a difference from PHP4 to PHP5. Some small things, but nothing earth shattering.
Re:Popular direction != right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats my take but I wouldn't expect the php community (at least not the development part of it) to know what true programming is like. Well at least not a majority of it for sure.
I don't think categorizing a group of people's knowledge of programming based on a language they use is fair or in any way accurate. I know a lot of people who use a lot of different languages, including PHP. Just because someone uses PHP to create a dynamic webpage does not imply that they are not capable of writing incredibly complex and bug free programs in PHP and/or other languages. I could make a statement that C programmers don't program with security in mind since we've seen so many buffer overflows. It doesn't make it accurate or even remotely true.
Re:Bad writing (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, for those mistakes that have been corrected, you wouldn't know about them. It's only the mistakes that stand out, which skews the viewpoint.
Humans are imperfect. Even Clippy can't help sometimes.
Some points... (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when is HTML a programming language?
I haven't written anything in PHP5 yet, but from what I've seen, I wouldn't call it "complex". If they find it "complex", they should just stick to HTML.
Yeah, they may run Windows as their desktop OS, but that doesn't stand for anything. Sure, they might usually check out their newest scripts in their desktop, but they all pretty much end up in their server, which is probably running some *NIX.
So? As long as the engine doesn't become slow or very resource hungry, more features are always welcome; the new OO model might help someone write better (e.g. cleaner) PHP code. If you don't like the new OO model, then just don't use it.
What does Linus have to do with PHP? Why would be care what Linus would do, seriously? Also, about that section mentioning all Zend people driving fancy cars and stuff, and the company trying to profit. Of course it's trying to profit; it's a company! I don't know of any companies that don't have profit in mind. They make a good engine, so PHP is based on it. Are you telling me that that shouldn't have happened because Zend is a company? Think again..
My $0.02
Re:I *like* the OO. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's with the hate.. (Score:4, Insightful)
People hate OOP, but complain about organization of code.
People hate writing the same things over an dover again themselves, but java has APIs for lots of things, so you don't have to do so.
So php is being pushed into an OOP direction, not a clean implementation, the APIs are being provided, ugly as they may be, and things were never unverbose/cryptic... so what's the problem again?
PHP programmers (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because most of the PHP programmers are uneducated writers of throw-away code. They are people who use PHP because they can make dynamic pages without needing to really learn anything; people who mix HTML and SQL; people who never bother to check for errors; people who think register_globals was a great idea, because they didn't have to type "complicated statements" like echo $_POST['somevar']; and the list goes on and on.
The most common argument I hear against PHP becoming more like Java is that now there are so many new things you need to learn. But this is not due to changes in the language making it harder to write crappy code - that's just as easy as it was before. The main reason for needing to learn new stuff seems to be the increasing number of competent programers in the PHP community who put pressure on the incompetent ones, who in turn pound their little fists on the table and cry that PHP is acquiring too many features from other languages. I'm sorry, but knowing the difference between "if" and "for" statements does not make you a programmer.
Ripping off Java is probbably the only real chance for PHP to be taken more seriously in the business world. After all, it worked for C#.
Re:Popular direction != right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
No it isn't. It's marking up text to describe the document structurally and semantically.
An HTML tag is merely the start of a structure, it isn't an instruction to a browser. Think "this is a paragraph", not "leave a vertical space"; think "this is a heading", not "increase the size of the text".
Re:What's with the hate.. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's just it - it isn't. PHP has made significant improvements to their object model in the 4.x and 5.x versions for those people that choose to use it. Everybody who doesn't like object-oriented programming can simply carry on using their own style and it doesn't affect them at all.
Re:Popular direction != right direction (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Just to clear up what seems to be a more common misconception then it should.
The author of the article is not referring to client side java (applets) but instead to server side java (jsp, servlets, j2ee). Server side java returns html just like php, perl, asp it just uses java as the processing language.
Re:Popular direction != right direction (Score:3, Insightful)
People who think HTML is a programming language really have no business setting the direction of PHP.
The article says 93% listed it as a "primary language." Not, as a "primary programming language." You do know what the L in HTML stands for, don't you?
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Java is not only something that runs as an applet in your browser - its a programming language that can run server side too, ever heard of JSPs or tomcat?
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Some points... (Score:4, Insightful)
The question diddnt ask for "primary programming language" it asked for "primary language". There are (apparently, from the survey) pleanty of web designers whose primary langage is HTML who use PHP. Or, there are pleanty of PHP users whose primary system is HTML. The point is that a large chunk of the userbase of PHP are not "programmers", but web developers. Making PHP more like Java makes PHP easier to pick up and use for Java developers. Which is great, if you a Java developer, but most of the PHP users are first HTML hackers.
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing the obvious, but all the 'old' scripts I have still work pretty good - without stopping any browser for 15 seconds (java) while it does its thing.
How can a browser be stopped for 15 seconds when you use Java on the server, like PHP?
Ah, you probably mean Java as Applet on a client?
But
angel'o'sphere
Re:I don't get it (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you talking about Java applets (and the time the VM takes to be loaded by the browser)? Java applets play a *very* minor role in today's Java picture. Java is used much more often on the server side, running in the web server (generating web pages as PHP does), or in application servers (implementing business logic and doing database transactions). Java has got a lot of momentum in the last 5-6 years. Making PHP more easily integrated with Java will enable it to fit into that picture, probably being a better choice than using Java itself for generating web pages. Not mentioning the huge number of Java libraries (for every application you can think of) - if PHP could call Java code without compromising performance, all those libraries would be readily available for use in PHP scripts.
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