Pierre,
People who think differently from you are not necessarily blind of
stubborn. I honestly think that those comments were completely out of
line in several different ways.
Regarding 'voting with feet', it's an idiom, look it up.
Zeev
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Pierre Joye [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2013 12:09 PM
> To: Zeev Suraski
> Cc: Lars Strojny; Derick Rethans; PHP Developers Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Give the Language a Rest motion (fwd)
>
> hi Zeev,
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 10:56 AM, Zeev Suraski <[email protected]> wrote:
> > What you're bringing up is not at all about adapting. Adapting is
> > something we do at the extensions, frameworks and tools levels. I'm
> > happy to say PHP's ecosystem here is very healthy, in my opinion.
>
> Yes, most of the time. But the language needs evolution, must have
evolution.
>
> F.e., how long have we been battled for annotations? With all respects,
it is
> about being blind and stubborn to say that PHP should not have
annotations.
> But due to some "I'm happy with what we have now" way of doing things,
we
> are very unlikely to have them any time soon, even if any major projects
out
> there are waiting for it, for years. Even the ZendFramework leads want
them
> now (changed their mind since the last attempt).
>
> This is not about borking the language with useless features. This is
not about
> being on the cutting edge. this is about catching up with the
competition.
>
> > Adapting is not what we're dealing with here. We're talking about
Adding.
>
> Adding? Surely a matter of wording. I'd to say evolve and catch up.
>
> > By adding more and more, we're making the language more and more
> > complex, less and less accessible to both new and existing developers,
> > thereby hurting its #1 appeal - simplicity.
>
> I heard that in php 4 > 5 and OO, and all we rejected back then have
been
> introduced since then. Not sure what is the best way, trying to stop
with all four
> feet (to take your analogy) any kind of additions/evolution/catching up
and then
> still doing it but years later, or trying to get a bit more open minded
and listen to
> our communities.
>
> > As we thrust forward towards 5.5,
> > more than half of the community is still on 5.2. 5.4 is virtually
> > nonexistent in terms of real world usage, and yet we thrust forward to
> > 5.5, as if the community at large cares about all these new features.
> > The community is voting with its feet, and that is probably the best
> > survey we're ever going to get.
>
> Excuse me? Voting with its feet? Dare to explain the underlying meaning
of this
> comment?
>
>
> > I'm not saying we shouldn't add new features. But I am saying that we
> > shouldn't add many of them. The very few we should add - should have
> > exceptional 'return on investment'. To be clear, the investment isn't
> > just the effort to develop or even maintain the implementation -
> > that's not even the main point. It's the increased complexity that
> > each and every new language construct brings with it, whether we like
it or
> not.
>
> Yes, totally agree here. Annotation and usable getter/setter syntax have
a huge
> ROI. Discuss with any application or framework developers/users will
bring you
> to the same conclusion.
>
> > There used to be a language that was the Queen of the Web. It was
> > full of clever syntax. It prided itself on having a variety of
> > expressive ways of doing the same thing. You're on the mailing list
> > of the language that dethroned it.
>
> You are living in the past glory. We are not willing to make PHP more
complex or
> kill it. We are willing to make compromises between the 2000s simplicity
and the
> needs of modern application developments.
> These compromises are not only required but possible.
>
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Pierre
>
> @pierrejoye