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All those words, and yet the word template only appears once. And that's to assert that PHP has: …no template system. There’s PHP itself, but nothing that acts

All those words, and yet the word template only appears once. And that's to assert that PHP has: …no template system. There’s PHP itself, but nothing that acts as a big interpolator rather than a program. As if that was a bug and not a feature. PHP succeeds because there is one PHP templating syntax and it is called "PHP". PHP started life as a templating language, and that's where its soul lies. Which is important, because if a non-programmer wants to start editing dynamic HTML pages, most likely the first thing they open in their text editor will be a template. And if a customer wants to change the website, but doesn't want to pay a highly-trained programmer (we're very expensive, especially because none of us really wants to be paid to edit templates all day), they'll hire someone who knows how to edit the theme. For every seasoned programmer in the world, there are half a dozen themers who know how to edit HTML and CSS, and maybe how to embed a "foreach" loop that calls a stock WordPress function, or edit an argument list, or swap one Drupal function name for another. And for every themer there's a dozen non-programmers who dream of knowing enough to be themers. This class of user is what every other platform tends to neglect. Ruby and Python programmers tend to design tools that are intuitive to other programmers. We build "frameworks", where one must tinker and monkey-patch and fork to such a degree that only another programmer can download and assemble a working system, let alone customize it. (One word: Gemfiles.) We write programmer-centric documentation filled with jargon terms from Javaschool, like "object". (PHP themers often do not understand OO, and often don't need to. This, all by itself, could be why PHP is so popular.) But one leaves a lot of money on the table when one designs software systems exclusively for users whose programming education entitles them to six-figure salaries. There aren't enough such people on earth; that's why they earn six-figure salaries. Designing the minimum viable product for borderline-non-programmers who want to tinker with dynamic web pages is hard work, though. PHP evolved into that niche, but if you don't start there it's hard to steer there deliberately. For me, trying to remember when object inheritance and version control and function definitions were mysterious is like trying to remember when I didn't understand algebra. (And, believe me, I really didn't understand, once. But I'll be damned if I can remember why not.) It's so hard to keep one's eye on that ball that even the PHP developers lost the plot long ago: PHP has long since bulked up with features borrowed from other languages. But if you ignore its newer features the soul of PHP is still a little templating language that you can edit into the HTML on your server; change a filename extension and reload and you're good to go. And, the thing is: You can write a crazy-complicated core system in PHP, but then expose it as an API at the template layer, and those tinkerers hacking at the HTML on their servers will be able to use it.

mquander 15y ago
Yeah, but what drives programmers nuts is that most of the problems in the language are totally independent of that ease of accessibility. Is there something about consistent naming, or consistent behavior of different library functions, or consistent syntax and operators -- they can be lenient and type-coercing, but consistent, like Javascript's -- that would make it a worse language for people to wade into in the form of templated HTML? Of course not. That's what irritates people, the endless parade of bad design decisions that appear totally bad, with no upside, where they could have just as easily made a good decision and didn't.
- joelangeway 15y ago
  I don't think that those problems are really independent, but rather, share a common cause with some of the things that made PHP a success. PHP evolved as it did in large part because its benevolent dictator refused to think about more than one problem at a time. I don't argue that that's the optimal way to do things, but it did provide a unique experiment for us all to learn from.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  How could I disagree? PHP is crazy. But these irritations are only apparent once you're inside the PHP conversion funnel. And, as I have observed time and again as a pro PHP developer, once a PHP programmer knows ten lines worth of PHP it is easier for them to struggle through the eleventh line than to start over with another system. The entrance to the funnel matters, a lot! Everyone passes through it, and the bulk of your user base will never even leave it. That's my theory of PHP's apparently inexplicable success. (It also explains a lot about every other platform's userbase, by the way.) And it's not as if one can't master PHP to the point that one could build, say, Facebook: It's empirically evident that one can build Facebook, WordPress, and Drupal in PHP. And, though PHP eventually turns into one gotcha after another - almost immediately, actually; the array() semantics are an absolute horror show - at every single step of the PHP experience there are ten people stuck on that step along with you, and you're all being coaxed ahead live, on the internet by the ten people who are stuck one step above you. So it eventually works out, at least as well as any good hack does, and trying to pretend otherwise doesn't fool anyone. You can try to tell people that PHP can't possibly fly, like the scientists in the urban legend who allegedly tried to claim that the bumblebee can't fly, and they'll smile at you and go back to struggling with PHP. The question implicit in your comment is: Could we design a system that offers the ease of accessibility of the first few steps of a PHP programmer's career but, as one climbs the learning curve, eventually blossoms into Python or Ruby or even Lisp? I wish I knew. My best guess as of this morning is that a demigod could design such a system, but it's very difficult for mortal humans to do so, because once you know how to program it's hard to avoid overdesigning, putting in things that will eventually be useful in year two but are discouraging in year zero. We make terrible pedagogical mistakes, like turning everything into an object. (Does your ORM seem intuitive to you? That is why PHP is beating your system in the marketplace.)

mquander 15y ago

Yeah, but what drives programmers nuts is that most of the problems in the language are totally independent of that ease of accessibility. Is there something about consistent naming, or consistent behavior of different library functions, or consistent syntax and operators -- they can be lenient and type-coercing, but consistent, like Javascript's -- that would make it a worse language for people to wade into in the form of templated HTML? Of course not. That's what irritates people, the endless parade of bad design decisions that appear totally bad, with no upside, where they could have just as easily made a good decision and didn't.

joelangeway 15y ago
I don't think that those problems are really independent, but rather, share a common cause with some of the things that made PHP a success. PHP evolved as it did in large part because its benevolent dictator refused to think about more than one problem at a time. I don't argue that that's the optimal way to do things, but it did provide a unique experiment for us all to learn from.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
How could I disagree? PHP is crazy. But these irritations are only apparent once you're inside the PHP conversion funnel. And, as I have observed time and again as a pro PHP developer, once a PHP programmer knows ten lines worth of PHP it is easier for them to struggle through the eleventh line than to start over with another system. The entrance to the funnel matters, a lot! Everyone passes through it, and the bulk of your user base will never even leave it. That's my theory of PHP's apparently inexplicable success. (It also explains a lot about every other platform's userbase, by the way.) And it's not as if one can't master PHP to the point that one could build, say, Facebook: It's empirically evident that one can build Facebook, WordPress, and Drupal in PHP. And, though PHP eventually turns into one gotcha after another - almost immediately, actually; the array() semantics are an absolute horror show - at every single step of the PHP experience there are ten people stuck on that step along with you, and you're all being coaxed ahead live, on the internet by the ten people who are stuck one step above you. So it eventually works out, at least as well as any good hack does, and trying to pretend otherwise doesn't fool anyone. You can try to tell people that PHP can't possibly fly, like the scientists in the urban legend who allegedly tried to claim that the bumblebee can't fly, and they'll smile at you and go back to struggling with PHP. The question implicit in your comment is: Could we design a system that offers the ease of accessibility of the first few steps of a PHP programmer's career but, as one climbs the learning curve, eventually blossoms into Python or Ruby or even Lisp? I wish I knew. My best guess as of this morning is that a demigod could design such a system, but it's very difficult for mortal humans to do so, because once you know how to program it's hard to avoid overdesigning, putting in things that will eventually be useful in year two but are discouraging in year zero. We make terrible pedagogical mistakes, like turning everything into an object. (Does your ORM seem intuitive to you? That is why PHP is beating your system in the marketplace.)