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.
As I was reading the article I was just thinking about how so many projects have exactly the type of leadership, vision and reputation norms that he wishes for in the PHP project, and the result is that people complain that project is elitist or unapproachable. In php-internals maybe you have to run with the bulls to get something done, but at least its accessible.
Death by a thousand cuts is still a death (and a slow and painful one at that). I'm hopeful that this is just the kick in the pants the project needs to get its act together.
It's unquestionably gotten better in recent years, but it still has a long and seemingly never ending list of warts. I don't see PHP getting forked anytime soon, but I do see developers moving to other languages routinely. And that's a shame since PHP is still, for better or for worse, the easiest language to get into for the novice.
PHP as an emergent phenomenon that is forcefully evolved by the sheer amount of need presented by the massive user base, in which any large scale forced reorganization would break the cycle and cause it to die (or at least fork)?
I suppose forking PHP is as realistic as forking Perl :)
Also i can imagine two major reasons PHP is not forked:
1) You have a small committed developerbase which is too much invested in the ecosystem (Zend and others).
2) Every other user (aka webdeveloper and PHP developers that want a major change) in the ecosystem may rather move on to another language then try to fork it. In the end: What what you do with a PHP fork that doesn't move in the direction of Ruby, Python and Co.?
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.