Re: [PHP-EVANGELISM] Bad rep?

Rasmus Lerdorf wrote:
> On Tue, 6 May 2003, Lothar Scholz wrote:
> 
>>And they are right, until PHP has real multithreading (with the new
>>hyperthreading Pentium-IV - it's a must have) and an application server
>>we won't see much better paid PHP jobs. 
> 
> 
> I thought this was a joke at first and was expecting a smiley.  But you 
> are actually serious!  That is one the of scariest things I have read in a 
> while.
> 
> -Rasmus
> 

Like almost everything else in the computer industry, it seems this 
subject is a little contentious? 8^)

Rasmus: I hope you didn't infer that my original email was intended as 
criticism. It was more observation and concern. I really do believe I 
wear a white hat.

However, from the replies and follow-up emails I don't draw much comfort 
and it seems to me that amongst the somewhat polarized views, the point 
is being missed.

<rant>
On the one hand we have a view that basically says you can't do anything 
really serious with PHP because it's stunted in some way. We also have 
the view that PHP might be regarded as a "toy" or "glue" because you can 
teach it to baby programmers or, by implication, that it doesn't really 
do anything really well.

PHP is precisely what every business should be looking at as its 
primary, general purpose scripting language. It is a benefit, not a 
flaw, that babies can learn it and then move on to use it for serious 
applications as they grow - PHP has more than sufficient low-level 
routine support to allow for "heavy" development in the hands of an 
experienced programmer - that's why I use it.

I hope you can see where I'm going with this: if the language isn't 
treated seriously because one polarized view or another berates it in 
one way or another, then the overall view becomes distorted and fails to 
recognise the real strengths.

OK - PHP is "general purpose". Who cares? OK - so it's got ZEND in the 
engine. Who cares? OK - so babies are playing with it. Who cares?

PHP is a GoodThing(TM) precisely because it *can* do many things and 
it's easy to get started with it. It exhibits the features of a flexible 
and forgiving language that are missing from things like C, Java and 
even Perl (in some ways), but retains enough structure to make learning 
its rules straightforward and imposes sufficient discipline to make sure 
that the programmer doesn't get too out of line.

 From experience guys, if you sell a customer Java without really 
understanding what you can do with PHP, you do these things: you ramp up 
your development and support costs, you reduce the number of customers 
you can support, you reduce the potential pool of talent you can use, 
you make less money in the long run. The customer doesn't give a shit 
what language you use - what they want is the functionality.

Similarly, if you rate a programmer by the number of languages he can 
speak, the chances are he's a confused individual if he speaks more than 
about 3 fluently.
</rant>

I really believe an "eye on the ball" is required. It's not really for 
the likes of me to evangelise about PHP or anything else - people make 
up their own minds as we know.

However, let's not go forward confusing the specific functionality, or 
lack thereof, of a language with it's ease of learning or with the value 
of what can be done with it in comparison to other, much vaunted (with 
misplaced evaluations in some cases) languages that are also out there.

Try telling Ralph Schumacher that he's not worth much because his F1 
Ferrari doesn't have many buttons to push....

Kindest regards to everyone who joined in....

Graham