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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

Stas responded here: http://news.php.net/php.internals/64775

"PHP's vision is being simple and practical and focused on the web. PHP is what people use to get their first site off the ground. PHP is what a web designer learns when he/she wants to go into programming. PHP is what a random Joe uses when he needs to whip up a page and he's in "do it yourself" mind. PHP is what you expect everybody to be able to handle, and everything to be able to run. It is not to serve everybody, every use case and every possible need."

Frankly, I don't understand this vision at all. Is PHP supposed to be a beginner's language that a webdev eventually moves on from? I mean, don't get me wrong: I used PHP for exactly that when I graduated from high school. But is the directive really, "Real programmers don't use our language"?

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That vision is stale and cancerous for the PHP community. The directive is and always has been along those lines, "real programmers don't use PHP". For some reason the core team has pushed that. There are a lot of us who use PHP full time who would also love for some real, cohesive decisions to be made in favour of bringing vision to PHP. Sadly the internals list is always just a shitstorm.

Anthony's view is that of someone trying to make the language better for those of us who use it day-to-day. To make it a real contender in web languages, because it does have that potential.

So PHP just has a "potential" to be a "contender" in a world of web languages, but only if it does what you like it to do, otherwise it's hopeless? In what world do you live in? What color is the sky there? In my world, PHP is already one of the leading tools used for web development, and has been there for years.

>>>> The directive is and always has been along those lines, "real programmers don't use PHP". For some reason the core team has pushed that.

This is false, core team never pushed anything like that.

Python has often been called an easy to learn language and a good first start because it tries to be easy to read.

Does that mean that it is also a beginner's language that people eventually are supposed to move on from?

The difference is that Python is actually a designed language, rather than an unholy congealed mass.

People who pickup Python will always stay and never move on completely.

My programming carear startet with perl -> php -> python and i found one holy grail to solve most of my problems. Python had an easy entry point the same as PHP but when you jumped over the first learning curve and discovered the complete ecosystem it`s mindblowing.

I never had that feeling with PHP you could do websites and thats it. And most of the time it gets a mess real quick. PHP will slowly phase out over the next decade.

> People who pickup Python will always stay and never move on completely.

To be blunt, that's not universally true. I've moved on to Go, with an eye for more functional languages this year.

Python is great, but it's not the last language.

I picked up Python and am now using Node/CoffeScript for web dev. I'll probably transition to Clojure in the future and I'll try Haskell after that.

> PHP will slowly phase out over the next decade.

Wanna bet on it?

> PHP will slowly phase out over the next decade.

Wordpress.

It's become a full blown CMS and its own platform. Half the media sites out there are running it, or hosting with Wordpress Pro. Then there's a horde of casual bloggers managing their own installs.

Granted, there's movement away from this kind of publishing model(Facebook, Twitter, G+), but as long as Wordpress is still the go to, "set it and forget it" app on $5 webhosts, PHP will not die.

Python was my first language. Haskell is my #1 language right now, and I do Java professionally. There have been many between.

It's a nice language, but it's not for everyone.

This is one of the points I always try to make with other tools... if you can do what you want with it, and it suits the needs of your project, you don't need to "move on" to something else.

Sure, it's good to keep your mind open, investigate other possibilities, and keep your eyes forward... but if you're able to draw the pictures you want and like, it doesn't matter if you're using crayons or oil paints.

Except that Guido never said that Python is meant only for a "random Joe" to "whip up" a script when "he's in a DIY mindset".

ETA: In fact, compare:

http://www.python.org/about/

http://php.net/manual/en/preface.php

Nowhere there it says "that a webdev eventually moves on from". It says it should be simple enough to start from. It does not say it is required for it not to be powerful. But when power conflicts with simplicity - we should prefer simplicity, within the bounds of reason of course. I believe we still have very good power - and popularity of PHP so far proves it enough, I think - but we probably won't be able to do some things. Like if you expect full lambda calculus and Haskell-like monads in PHP, it is not likely to happen soon.

>>>> But is the directive really, "Real programmers don't use our language"?

Of course not. How any of the examples given about say any of the people mentioned aren't real? Do you consider real programmer be only guy who writes incomprehensible code in incomprehensible language that does incomprehensible things?

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