Hello, Alexander Wagner wrote: > > Manuel Lemos wrote: > > There is no doubt about that, but the original poster was asking why > > PHP is not part of college curriculum and I was explaining that > > unlike other languages that are marketed by companies with big > > brands, there is no big brand behind PHP to push it at any comparable > > level. > > While I agree that better marketing would greatly benefit PHP, and > might even get it into some universities, I don't think it is the main > obstacle. > IMHO PHP does not have much of a place in university. > Languages like Haskell, Scheme and Gopher, have always been quite > successful in university although there has rarely been anything useful > done with them in the world outside and marketing behind them has > always been near zero. > > Universities care a lot about concepts, or how to "do it right". PHP's > focus is on people who are new to programming and on "do it right now". > The latter, aka "Worse is better", while being successful and > important in the free world, is not very suitable for universities.
Yes, I know that there are a lot of academics not only in Universities but also in R&D departments of large companies (Telecoms mainly) that just have a guaranteed budget to research on subjects without proven utility. I just don't think that is with all universities or R&D departments and even those have still people focused on the real world because they need to research and produce at least a small percentage of their work with value for the company or university. If they don't, they die killed by the concurrency that does that. > PHP's design is not very clean, that never was the goal and it's > probably better this way., because what PHP wanted to achieve it did > achieve (I think). Yes, I agree, Java is conceptually nicer but in the real world PHP is more suitable for many types of applications because it lets people be more productive regardless the design is not very clean as you say. This is a true argument that PHP advocates need to be ready to throw wherever and whenever needed. If we don't, PHP looses opportunities, I think. > I can't think of very much actual facts (as opposed to marketing) that > would make universities interested in PHP. > One of those I can think of is MetaL, btw. Yes, I assume that MetaL would appeal to academics because it is innovating while it did not yet have proven its utility in the real world, at least that most people are aware of. I don't have a problem to jump in MetaL presentations and tell that it was developed with more than 20.000 lines of pure PHP code and that if it was not written in PHP but in some other language like Java/C/C++ it would have taken much more time to develop because it makes extensive use of the easy way that PHP provides access to associative and dynamic arrays, making me much more productive in my R&D on the subject. While it is true, I hope it also helps making a good impression of the PHP advantages. I think advocates should focus on PHP advantages that can be summarized in a few phrases of compeling arguments. > > To illustrate what I am say, althought it was not a language but a > > Open Source OS, Linux did not start taking much credit until Red Hat > > started distributing it and entered to NASDAQ. From then on, Red Had > > become a big brand (at least a noticeable one) and Linux was not > > necessarily the best free Unix like OS. Red Hat made it a big deal as > > we all know. > > Linux was successful in universities before it was successful outside. > PHP is very successful outside, and I fear that conquering universities > from where PHP is successful now is simply neither very probable nor, > at the current state of PHP, very desirable. Developing PHP as a good technical solution is not sufficient to make as popular as needed. You need to know how to make a compeling argument that convinces the different types of audience that may be attracted to it. Academics, like every other group should be addressed with arguments that they value. Advocates should focus on the target audience, not just in PHP. Regards, Manuel Lemos -- PHP Development Mailing List <http://www.php.net/> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact the list administrators, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
