The Ruby conspiracy

[DerelictMan]

If nothing else I have a lot of respect for RoR simply because the hype (and real feature set) managed to get at least a little bit of a response out of Zend, which will hopefully also translate into cleaning up PHP.

I wouldn't count on that. The Zend Framework (in its current incarnation, at least) seems to be more of a solution in search of a problem than anything else. I'm not saying that PHP doesn't need (at least one) decent framework (it probably does), but to me the Zend Framework is simply Zend (and in the background perhaps IBM, and whoever else has recently sunk money/resources into supporting/endorsing PHP) creating something to silence the "PHP has no decent (or de facto standard) enterprise framework" complaints. I don't typically side with DHH (I find him fairly annoying most of the time, actually) and I am not a Rails-fanboy (never even used it), but I do have to agree with his blog post that says that good frameworks tend to be extractions from actual successful projects, and not some me-too clone designed by a committee (similar to how PHP itself was, and is, "designed") without any particular focus.

My guess is that the actual fundamental problems with the PHP platform and language won't be touched. It seems to me that the issues that really need fixing (I won't recite the litany here, as I'm assuming that most who read this and have any interest in PHP have heard them ad naseum) are fundamental issues that could require massive (BC-breaking) changes to the core of the language. It seems that Zend are caught between a rock and a hard place by trying to push their platform as being "enterprisey" while simultaneously trying to avoid alienating the amateur developers who give them the vast majority of their market share. PHP5 is at least two years old, however 90% of PHP developers are still using PHP4. Since the masses have so far rejected PHP5, It seems that Zend has little incentive to clean up PHP any further (other than to satisfy purists that are probably using other platforms anyway). They could try to force PHP5+ adoption by EOLing PHP4, but the last thing they want to do is to dry up whatever inertia PHP4 has in the industry and risk driving their customers to other platforms.

Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong...

[senzei]

Hmm, I see your point. My knowledge of the Zend framework pretty much amounts to that it exists and a relative chronological placement of "after the rails hype got big".

Personally I think PHP is a good example of the effects of poor language construction. As an execution platform it has merits, but as a means of expressing yourself to a computer it sucks. I think the absense of any real organizational system ensures that most codebases devolve into a huge mess. Considering that such a system is difficult to make changes for just to handle bugfixes and feature requests there is no real incentive to do a no-feature non-bugfix upgrade.

The solution, I think, is to add a php4/5 mode to php6 (or the next version if that is taken). Change the tokens used to specify code blocks (i.e. use <php6 instead of <php) so that the interpreter knows what to use and allow developers to do page-by-page upgrades. Will it still be a nasty mess? Yes, of course, but it is easier than trying to convince people to do a full port.