What I am saying is if we accepted even 50% of what people felt very passionate about because their "favorite language of the day" has it then PHP would become overly complex, bloated and very challenging for users to pick up. C++ for example was a good language but is a good example of trying to do too much and getting overly complex over time (at least in my opinion).
I do think we should have new feature discussions and need to ensure PHP evolves with the market and its users but have to ensure that we still keep it simple, easy to adopt and maintainable. Also, I think we do not need 100 ways of doing the same thing. Choice is good but too much choice is not. As I said in my previous email, while I think there are areas we can and should innovate in and evolve the core language I believe a lot of the innovation also has to happen at the framework and extension-level. I do not think there's a resource issue at the language level. When a new feature does get slated to be included we always have plenty of resources deployed on it to harden it and make sure it gets into the core vm in the right way (it is almost never the same as the original patch). I do think having more people work on extensions for some of the up and coming technologies would be super valuable. Seems like everyone wants to try and get their favorite language feature in but less are stepping up to work on extensions. What can you contribute? Andi From: dukeofgaming [mailto:dukeofgam...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 7:36 PM To: Andi Gutmans Cc: Pierre Joye; Derick Rethans; PHP Developers Mailing List Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Give the Language a Rest motion (fwd) Hi, I think that -in any context- the "if it aint broke don't fix it" is a very depressing attitude to have, and a very wrong one in any open source community. If the signal to noise ratio is the problem, I think its better to focus on that problem, not shutting down the signal. If PHP is a resource crunched project, I think its better to focus on that problem, not rejecting feature requests. (I might appear as impertinent with what I'm going to say, but bear with me, I'm being well-intentioned and mean no offense; just want to be honest). Regarding the signal to noise ratio, I have one question: how did traits get accepted?, having seen the kind of conversations in the lists it makes almost no sense to me how something so "radical" and complex could make its way to PHP so quickly and a simple and convenient thing like a short array syntax cannot, and something so basic as annotations raises so much pointless (just not to say ignorant) debate. Was it the to-the-point RFC and solid patch?, was it that the conversations were just on another level so not anyone could just say -or troll- "traits are no solution! *spit*, lets do aspects instead!". I know it took some time, but while lurking the lists IIRC I never saw any opposition to traits... could anyone tell me what was the magic behind this?, could it be repeated?. Regarding resources, I think this is one of the main things rendering the community unhealthy (at least it feels like that to me) and I even feel bitterness in the air. I think that the definite solution to this is a DVCS like git and hosting the code at github, or like mercurial and hosting the code at bitbucket, please don't be angered at this suggestion (as I know the switch to SVN is a fairly recent one), you can ask around SVN geeks that went the distributed way and they will tell you things, wonderful things of how they don't know how could they could endure that much with that in their project, and if its an open source one, how much the switch has done in favor of contributions. Regardless of everything, I like that the PHP community has so much passion and energy, sometimes in a not constructive way, but that is a good problem to have in my opinion, really, don't take it for granted, it just needs a little direction. Best regards, David Vega On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:46 PM, Andi Gutmans <a...@zend.com> wrote: >-----Original Message----- >From: Pierre Joye [mailto:pierre....@gmail.com] >Sent: Wednesday, June 15, 2011 2:33 AM >To: Andi Gutmans >Cc: Derick Rethans; PHP Developers Mailing List >Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Give the Language a Rest motion (fwd) > >On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 7:02 AM, Andi Gutmans <a...@zend.com> wrote: > >> Hence my suggestion to bundle MongoDB extension and possibly work on >additional extensions. Some of my suggestions probably rightfully didn't get >much interest such as Thrift. > >See my comment in your other thread and below. > >> Maybe we should consider making a list of extensions we think could be >beneficial and the new mentorship program can actually help deliver some of >them? > >I do not thnk it is a good thing to begin a discussion about this exact topic >and >then totally ignore it. > I think it got lost in the very long and varying discussions. Will dig up and take a look. I had a couple of hectic weeks. >I also think that it is somehow wrong to post something asking to do not >propose >new things when we finally have more people involved in proposals and >discussions. Maybe that's just me me but I do think that the main problem we >have (besides the ones we identified and try to fix right now) is the complete >lack of open discussions about possible new features, in this list with new or >existing contributors. I did not say we should not propose or have discussions (I am in favor of adding [] for arrays for example). But I am saying the bias should be not to include new language functionality unless it has very broad appeal & serious upside impact. The bias should be against feature creep. Andi > >-- >Pierre > >@pierrejoye | http://blog.thepimp.net | http://www.libgd.org -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
