> > > Rene, I don't want you to jump ship. You've been helpful to many other posters, and I appreciate various points of view on all subjects, yours included. Please bottom post in the future now that you know of their preference, and please step back for a few and take some time to relax.
No harm, no foul (a phrase I appreciate more and more as I slow down on the court ;) I will confess that I understand why Rene feels ganged up on. While the words used to counter him have been quite restrained, his request for a feature has been consistently met with "You must be doing the other stuff wrong" responses. That doesn't speak to the heart of the issue, and Rene from previous posts has shown that he's quite capable on many fronts. Requesting a new feature does not necessarily mean that somebody isn't best using the current features. For example, in the past, PHP considered a new array syntax, but those against it expressed the belief that the current syntax was sufficient: http://markmail.org/message/rsi4welftwou24p3 Sufficient, PHP often is, but it's competing within a diverse eco-system of increasingly capable languages, and I hope we all keep focused on how it can continue to improve. The value of our skill set is largely dependent on the strength of the other PHP developers out there, the availability of PHP, etc. Whether it's a new array syntax, threading, or any other new feature, I hope we all carefully deliberate on what the feature may do to attract new PHP developers and keep existing PHP developers. True, developers can mix and match languages as needed, but I find I hear phrases like "Well, if language X doesn't support Y, then why not use langauge Z for everything." That doesn't mean I agree with that approach, but sentiment among executives does exist. For the record, I liked the alternative array syntax suggested in my example, and I've said earlier in this thread that I'd like threading. My example is my web framework. It doesn't use front- or page-level-controllers, but rather micro-controllers with embedded views. Autonomous views could be elegantly processed in parallel, speeding the rendering of the page. And, in F# and Clojure, this is exactly what I'm doing. It would be really nice to do this in PHP, too, as I really do love PHP. And in many examples, caching is not the answer (information is often user specific and/or time specific.) Perhaps some of you won't agree with this need, but that doesn't mean it's not playing a role in the value proposition of PHP in my work. That said, this is not the only reason I'd be for threading, as I believe PHP is directly competing with several other very nice languages in many situations (Python, Ruby, Scala, C#, F#, Scala, etc.), and they all offer some form of threading, and I hope PHP continues to attract a broad range of talents amongst the alternatives. Now, do I expect threading in the near future? NO. PHP does present some special issues for this feature. However, I hope we all will carefully consider where we want PHP to be in the future language market whenever we consider any new features, be they arrays, threading, or mind control ;) I'll not speak anything further on this thread. Adam -- Nephtali: PHP web framework that functions beautifully http://nephtaliproject.com
