The author is complaining about lack of vision, leadership and regulations. And most of us can perfectly understand that, except: those are exactly the things that set PHP apart from most other major open source projects.

It is by far the most anarchic and disorganized major OSS project and yet it still thrives. It still moves forward, it still gets better. Yes, it's design foundations as a language are not particularly elegant (to put it mildly), but that's pretty much the only major thing that's wrong with the resulting product.

According to all known wisdom about how an OSS community should function, PHP should have imploded and forked a long time ago. It should no longer exist.

And yet, despite this "I quit" rant, PHP has had relatively few major conflicts. The PHP way is unique, and while it may offend the sensibilities of people who like a nicely organized and disciplined community ran by a benevolent dictator or inspiring visionary, dammit, it works.

I strongly suspect that any successful attempt to solve PHP's organizational "problems" would actually result in killing it stone dead.

We already have Python and Ruby ea. PHP should stay weird.

I read php-internals every day, and.. this is totally understandable. There's a lot of opinionated people on that list with totally different visions - nikic, stas, that one guy Lester who is convinced 5.3 and E_STRICT was the worst thing in the world... PHP just appeals to too many people to have a consensus. Possibly the point this was made most clear was when the property accessors RFC was declined on a hairpin vote despite having a majority (and the time that switching to an actual AST-based parser was a non-starter).

Your contributions and voice will be missed.

An eyeopener for me was reading parts of the discussion how the new namespace seperator was chosen: http://pastebin.com/2iJP4Qhx (from https://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespaceseparator)

If you read that IRC log and truly believe that a multi-million/billion dollar ecosystem/environment should be ruled by what reads like kids between 12-16 chatting, then go ahead. I won't. Apart from that there is enough rant on PHP on the internet already ;)

Subscribe to it for awhile and you'll see.

It also turned off the suhosin author to the point where he moved onto other stuff.

He had some great ideas, now lost (no longer works with PHP > 5.3 )

But Zend shows up and folds back in some great stuff into PHP once in awhile.

Take a look at their now opensourced opcode cache, it's faster than all others.

This is super relevant. How to protect your open source project from poisonous people.

http://www.slideshare.net/vishnu/how-to-protect-yourhow-to-p...

I'd often wondered if the patchwork, self-contradicting, non-standard, anarchistic nature of PHP was a reflection of the mind-set of the creators.

Any large community has these problems. This is the advantage to using forum engines that allow non-anonymous upvotes/downvotes over a naive mail-list - people can silently agree and separate the wheat from the chaff, and consensus becomes far more visible. You can even give the important contributors greater "weight" to the ups/downs (this is not a democracy, contributors are worth more).

I recently started learning PHP as my first programming language and I love it so far. But the amount of negativity and hatred I see towards PHP on the internet (even among so-called PHP lovers) makes me question my decision of learning PHP.

My main purpose for learning PHP is for web-development. I have looked into java code and I felt like I am going to shit pants if I have to learn that.

2 questions.

- Am I wasting my time with PHP?

- What are some good alternative for web-development that preferably doesn't have a steep learning curve?

There is pretty much new independent PHP engines nowadays, one of my favorite is an embedded PHP5 implementation named PH7 written in ANSI C and following the SQLite3 coding style (very impressive) http://ph7.symisc.net

PHP is addictive.

You can create whole web app in one PHP file from scratch and it will have everything including API and DB management layer and be secure and fully functioning.

And it will work on all servers and on all operating systems.

Millions are made by average developers developing themes and plugins for wordpress.

Hard to beat all that.

#drama is for queens :)

I think the only hope PHP has of continuing development is if someone big like Facebook can add some direction to it. Maybe they will but I think last I checked even they were giving up on using it for much more then a thin veneer to their back end services.

I think what's important here is that PHP developers shouldn't look past the curtain. The whole web stack is a house of cards. The state of PHP doesn't change that. ;)

PHP is powering a huge industry. A lot of money is flowing on PHP code, from PHP developers banging out code for paying clients to companies like Facebook which got started as PHP apps. Wordpress powers a ridiculous number of companies which run on its code.

PHP may be a mess, but lets keep things in perspective. The state of what really matters is alive and well.

HN white knights JavaScript but hates PHP. I can't figure it out. Each language is horrible in similar ways.

Writing in PHP is a war against the platform - that's why PHP code tends to look like a battlefield...

He complains about how internals lacks leadership, so why doesn't step up and fill that void instead of running away?

PHP will be useful if the bloat is eliminated. Just plain procedural scripting, simple, straight - Nothing else is needed. By the way, that is my view of any scripting language. Languages used to write complex systems should be type safe and strictly structured.

Is this just a case of meritocracy at play?

I haven't followed the full discussion and events leading up to here, but would it be very wrong to assume this just a case of a bystander starting a discussion that didn't really catch on with any of the active maintainers?

Slightly off topic, but relevant question: how many people move away from PHP because they get too annoyed to work with it - even if it does "work" - and how many are moving from other languages _to_ PHP because they had enough of another language.

Move to Python, I'm sure the community can benefit from your skills. I see no future in PHP development. If the core is rotten ,you can have the best libs in the world (symfony,doctrine,...) in the end you still need to face PHP architectural problems. Or back to the JVM maybe.

Am I the only one who feels like this is a temper-tantrum of somebody who wanted to be in charge of more toys, punctuated with some salient (but obvious) points about PHP?