Re: [PHP-EVANGELISM] Bad rep?

On Wed, 7 May 2003, Graham wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 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.

And what in the world does that have to do with multithreading and 
application servers?  Do you really believe that the serious web companies 
out there like Google, Amazon and Yahoo use multithreaded application 
servers?  Do you really believe that sort of architecture scales to 
10,000+ web servers?  

Your implication was that because PHP does not have threads and because it 
isn't an application server, it is not a serious language suitable for 
large-scale deployment.  You have apparently bought into the marketing 
hype from BEA, Sun or IBM or some other company that stands to gain quite 
a bit by having you fall for this.  It is exactly because PHP is not an 
application server that it is suitable for large-scale deployment.  It 
lends itself extremely well to a large distributed deployment where a 
single-point-of-failure application server is a nightmare.

> 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.

Right, flexible and easy to learn and maintain.  I don't think our message 
has been any different from this for years.

> 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.

I guess I still fail to see your point.  We are not going to draw up ROI 
charts and other marketing crap.  I am probably the primary PHP evangelist 
around having spoken at conferences and user groups around the world over 
and over again for the past 5 years.  The message has always been very 
concise: "PHP Solves the Web Problem" or, depending on the audience, "PHP 
is the scripting language for the Web."

-Rasmus