In defence of PHP*
I’m cross posting this from the discussion over at Marco’s blog, where he talks about how the PHP community has failed the PHP project… people love bashing software projects like PHPNuke, having worked with PHPNuke when it was the ONLY peice of software which did what it did, I like pointing out the other side of the coin.
As much as PHPNuke is bashed, the number of people who have been hurt by it is greatly dwarfed by the number of people who used it as a tool that made their internet publishing dreams come true. At one point PHPNuke was very innovative, I think this is clear through the fact that it was used by companies as big as Mandrake Linux, who also employed the author to work on PHPNuke for over 2 years. The problem with PHPNuke is the fact that it never stopped being a one-man-show, and never fully embraced the true open source model, which is proven by the 30+ forks which have come and gone.
I’m actually going somewhere with this.
Why do the masses know about Ruby? Do they know about it because of the cool OO syntax? More than likely they know about ruby because of a certain very innovative web building platform which, like PHPNuke, carries the name of the programming language in it.
You take the good with the bad. PHPNuke is a part of PHP application development history, and while it doesn’t seem that PHPNuke was able to learn from their own mistakes, the rest of the development community has. It’s easy to sit back and say “I wish PHP* was never written,” but would PHP, or your current business/salary/magazine be where it is without those programs having run their course? I doubt it.
Flame away 