Is PHP In Trouble?
I like PHP, I really do. PHP5 is a great language and was a huge step in the right direction, unfortunately the community doesn’t agree. It is not that the PHP community thinks PHP5 is bad, it is just that they don’t agree on anything really. I am starting to wonder if the lack of cohesion is going to bring real trouble to success of PHP as a language.
I no longer write much PHP since I spend most of my time working with Ruby on Rails, but I do have a vested interest in PHP remaining a successful platform for serious development since it has a prominent role on my resume. Unfortunately the PHP community seems to lack the focus and agreement necessary to progress much further.
The lack of a successful framework for PHP is a serious problem. It sounds like Cake could end up being the crowd favorite, but I imagine that would be hard to do with Zend making so much noise about their own offering. The Zend Framework seems doomed to me at this point. It is a bad sign that people are leaving the development team before it gets completed. To me that is an indication that there isn’t much real excitement going on and that the team lacks the ‘one vision / one mind’ needed to pull off such a project. There also seems to be some really odd decisions made about the order of development of the Zend Framework (RSS syndication was more important than authentication?).
In 2003 the Zend IDE was a huge boost to developer productivity, PEAR was gaining traction, PHP5 was on the horizon and it was going to fix the object oriented features and add namespaces, and additional features were being directed towards PECL to reduce bloat; PHP was poised to take over. Then there was a big debate about exceptions vs. PEAR::Error and everything seems to start unravelling. Namespaces were taken out. Bickering flared up on the PEAR and php-internals mailing lists. PHP5 kept being delayed. Zend started offering certification for developers but ignored PHP5. The luster was tarnished and the community hasn’t recovered.
I hope I am wrong, but it looks like it is not going to improve anytime soon.
I have posted this in several places. The language with the best documentation will always win the language wars. Sure there are lots of web sites and tutorials for PHP but look at a bookstore…Which language has more books, PHP or .Net? .Net of course, you say because MS has marketing dollars to fund it.
Trus, but what did they do with those marketing dollars? Publish books, easy to follow tutorials, how-to books, step-by-step books. these are the things newbies, whether to the language or to programming, need to get started.
The language in which it is fastest to become productive will ALWAYS win. How do you become the fastest in which to become productive? Documentation, tutorials, how-tos, step-bystep,…
Personally I like PHP but I am looking at other languages now because there are few definitive works on certain subjects and disagreement among some ways to do certain things that are very important to me.
Just my 2 cents.
I agree with ‘Just another developer’ the easy access is key.
What markets are you talking about?
PHP is still king in the “moved from HTML and CSS to backend development” amateur crowd, and it looks likely to remain that way. I know I don’t see many of the kind of end-user projects that these users start with in any other languages. (WordPress plugins, phpBB mods etc.) Even if they exist, they don’t seem to be getting any attention. There’s limited adoption of PHP5 amongst this lot because they either don’t understand or don’t care about things like exceptions and interfaces, or if they do they want to continue targetting the PHP4 install-base. That vicious circle is a problem that Zend hasn’t helped address (backwards compatibility issues, for instance, and the fact that they haven’t worked out a method for running PHP4 and 5 Apache modules at the same time). Still, the point was that I haven’t seen the communities around other languages offer much to draw these users away.
On the other side of the coin, PHP5 and 6 features are being used almost exclusively by the enterprise crowd. They were genuinely excited about SPL, PDO etc., and they’re the same people making inroads into markets requiring high-performance systems, scalable systems etc., hitherto mostly dominated by Java etc. It’s a different league entirely, but Zend’s been very good to them lately. They’re the ones most likely to be attracted by attracted by other languages, but they have more reason than ever to stay with PHP.
Then, too, you have to realize that not everyone wants a framework. There are performance issues, dependency issues, style issues…