3 ms·

As time goes by, I think the time to get started in a new system (which for PHP is almost 0 time) is one of the most important things. The problem is that the

As time goes by, I think the time to get started in a new system (which for PHP is almost 0 time) is one of the most important things. The problem is that the developers of rails / grails / Wt / SproutCore / Flex / Struts / GWT / Django / Flask / Zope / Merb / Zotonic might be sure their framework is the greatest ever, and clearly worth a couple of days (or even a couple of hours) of someone's time to get it all configured and get started. However, I just see this giant list of options, each of which is in it's time the 'best thing ever'. How am I supposed to know which one to choose? Getting people started quickly and easily should be priority 1 if you want more users. EDIT: Oh, one other strength of PHP. Many people when they start want to turn a static website they already have into a dynamic one. This is how I started on PHP, just including fixed headers and footers in a website. Then slightly customised headers which knew which page I was currently on. Then adding cookies to remember what users had already done. Then finally full user support. In general, one thing PHP excels at adding the '1% dynamic' to an existing static website. However, I don't think this is as big a market as it once was, I don't think that many people learn a lot of HTML and make big static website anymore, then try to add dynamic elements later (or perhaps, I just associate with different people nowadays)

mgkimsal 14y ago
Another part of what makes something "best" is... size/scope of developer community. PHP quickly gained a foothold, and, for better or worse, continues to be popular in part because it's popular. I don't mean that as an insult at all, but it's a continued factor. If tomorrow everyone stopped releasing open source code for PHP, it would gradually die off in several years while people transitioned to alternatives, and we'd end up with some other 'largest minorty' tech/stack getting a lot of attention. You're right about the 1%, and it's why classic ASP did as well as it did for a while too, until that was killed off. The fact that big players who once scoffed at PHP now embrace it (MS is a big one) shows how big PHP is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future Will PHP be here in 3-5 years? certainly. 10 years? possibly, but with a difference at least as big as php/fi -> php5 is, so current php5 skills won't really be of much use on their own.

mgkimsal 14y ago

Another part of what makes something "best" is... size/scope of developer community. PHP quickly gained a foothold, and, for better or worse, continues to be popular in part because it's popular. I don't mean that as an insult at all, but it's a continued factor. If tomorrow everyone stopped releasing open source code for PHP, it would gradually die off in several years while people transitioned to alternatives, and we'd end up with some other 'largest minorty' tech/stack getting a lot of attention. You're right about the 1%, and it's why classic ASP did as well as it did for a while too, until that was killed off. The fact that big players who once scoffed at PHP now embrace it (MS is a big one) shows how big PHP is and will continue to be for the foreseeable future Will PHP be here in 3-5 years? certainly. 10 years? possibly, but with a difference at least as big as php/fi -> php5 is, so current php5 skills won't really be of much use on their own.