Open Thread, July 1-15, 2012

OpenThreadGuy

There seems to be a PHP Singularity. (Yeah.)

I was recently thinking about this: (1) PHP is a horrible, horrible, horrible language, but (2) many people use it anyway. It means it does some things right (at least for the given set of people), but it also does so many things wrong. Switching to Perl, Ruby or Python is apparently not seen as a good choice by the PHP users, because those languages miss... something. (Perhaps a simplicity for a total newbie, e.g. not having to think about libraries, etc.)

In my opinion, the good solution would be to make a new language "PHP done correctly". (Of course it would have different name, for copyright reasons.) It should have all the advantages of PHP, without the stupid design choices. If done correctly, it has a potential to gain millions of users (current PHP users). Some thoughts about the language:

visually similar to PHP. We are trying to steal their user-base, right? So I would keep the "<? ... ?>" syntax for inserting code into HTML page, and a dollar prefix for "$variableNames". The goal is to make a PHP user look at the "Hello World" examples or the new language and think "Oh, it's just like PHP", because learning a new programming language is an inconvenience. (By the way, using dollars for variables is a good way to avoid naming conflicts with keywords.)
there should be a web tool where you can copy-paste your code and it will highlight all errors. Syntax errors, wrong function names, etc.
the first version should support the most important things PHP supports now. For me it would be displaying a text and connecting to a database.
it should support namespaces and classes, done correctly. These may be different from PHP, because noobs (most of the PHP userbase) don't understand them anyway, so it is a good opportunity to improve the language design. At this point we don't have to be backwards compatible.
it needs to be distributed with a lot of tutorials. Many beginners want to google their solutions. So the product website should include an example discussion forum, an example database editor, etc. All these examples as simple as possible.
variable declaration optional (sorry, most people want it like this), but include a command that changes it (like "use strict" in Perl).

Viliam_Bur14y50

Vaniver14y00

It should have all the advantages of PHP, without the stupid design choices.

Outside view: I would suspect that many of the advantages of PHP stem from design choices that seem stupid to you.

0dbaupp14y

There is Python Server Pages which uses <% ... %> to delimit Python code, but is otherwise very similar to PHP. Using this gives you all of the Python language & standard lib so it satisfies most of the requirements. However, it should be noted that the PHP nature of mixing logic and templates is (mostly) an antipattern.

2sixes_and_sevens14y

For a few months in 2004 I did a brief stint as a PHP developer. It's on a few older versions of my CV, which has been thoroughly crawled by recruitment agents. Since then I have regularly received speculative emails from recruiters trying to fill PHP developer positions, sometimes as many as 20 a week. They all pay a lot less than I could earn elsewhere, so I ignore them, but there is definitely massive industry demand for low-mid level PHP developers, at least in the UK. I suspect this might be something to do with how PHP requires a whole bunch of orbital skills before you can really be effective with it, and if you have those skills, you can probably do something more useful with them than code in PHP.