LWN: Comments on "The history and evolution of PHP governance"

The history and evolution of PHP governance

davidgerard — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 12:56:22 +0000

Did Facebook's HipHop project have any influence worth noting?

The history and evolution of PHP governance

darwi — Sun, 07 Jun 2020 00:27:43 +0000

> Would you care to remind us what the website which originated that thought-terminating catchphrase runs on?

Wikipedia is definitely a critical project, and I know of its PHP use, but from a pure technical perspective, it's definitely not "some of the most interesting technical problems on the web."

I don't object to the LWN article in any way. It's amazingly written. But saying that the language is used for "some of the most interesting technical problems on the web" is a huge claim, and it warranted at least *one* follow-up statement showing some examples.

Getting more interested about this, I found this article on Slack development blog: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329. It explains why PHP is still relevant in a very good way.

The history and evolution of PHP governance

flussence — Sat, 06 Jun 2020 04:55:27 +0000

Would you care to remind us what the website which originated that thought-terminating catchphrase runs on?

The history and evolution of PHP governance

jwarnica — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 19:01:00 +0000

Modernizing a PHP 4 codebase. (I jest!)

The history and evolution of PHP governance

hholzgra — Fri, 05 Jun 2020 07:00:41 +0000

" A good example of this is SimpleXML, which provides object-oriented mapping of XML documents. The experimental implementation of that feature more or less just appeared in the code base one day without much of any discussion at all. Back in the early 2000s, if you knew how to do it and it seemed reasonable, most of the time your code made it into a release. "

Well, back then there was no separate extension repository, so almost all such user contributions ended up under the main repositories "ext" directory.

There was a text file listing who was the maintainer of what extension, and not all extensions would be enabled by default when you built PHP from source.

I added a few extensions myself back in the days ("ctype", "dbplus", "magic" (later replaced by the more general "fileinfo", "ncurses", ...).

Later PECL became the home for new extensions, and only few of them ever found their way into the main repositories "ext" folder after that, while some of the more obscure ones in "ext" were pushed out to PECL.

The history and evolution of PHP governance

darwi — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 23:44:07 +0000

> The PHP language is widely used in solving some of the most interesting technical problems on the web.

citation needed.

The history and evolution of PHP governance

jkingweb — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:42:43 +0000

I was familiar with the process, but not its history nor its politics. Thanks for the interesting read, John. :)

"messy"

gus3 — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 02:40:39 +0000

Python's transition from BDFL to managerial had its moments, but the project survived, and continues to thrive. I don't doubt PHP can do the same, even if the challenges to it are markedly different.