PHP Foundation formed to fund core developers, vows to pay 'market salaries'

A group of 10 companies is forming a new PHP Foundation, with temporary administrators including PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf. The trigger for this initiative appears to be the decision of Nikita Popov, a significant PHP contributor, to focus mainly on LLVM in future. Popov, currently a software developer at JetBrains working on …

[Swarthy]

$300K?! At market rates?

So they are trying to upgrade to three developers who know what's going on?

[chuBb.]

Re: $300K?! At market rates?

Great make it thrice as shite instead of twice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: $300K?! At market rates?

I wonder how they could manage to work on three different version at the same time...

Anyway it looks a lot of open source keeps on to have funding issues, despite how many companies use their code.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut it down when the money runs out?

Every PHP-based website I've seen has had such awful hard-to-maintain code behind it that I wonder if it's even possible to write nice PHP. While I'm all for developers getting paid, I also can't help wondering if PHP being shut down might end up being good for humanity. Surely there are Better Languages out there for the job?

[Nick Stallman]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

As a full time PHP developer, I challenge you to name that mythical language that fills the purposes that PHP fulfills.

Also since a lot of people want to dabble with websites and use PHP to do so, and often make bad code, there's nothing to stop them from making bad code in another language.

Wishing PHP to die off is like shooting the messenger - there's nothing inherently wrong with modern PHP as a language.

[chuBb.]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

there's nothing inherently wrong with modern PHP as a language

LOL!!!!!!

There is nothing modern about php, its had a few things badly tacked on since asp classic (vbscript)

It's attempts at the bleeding edge concept object orientation are out right broken and on par with vbscript attempts

Still it's a mess of conflicting naming conventions on built in language functions

It's syntax is all over the shop is it '.' or '=>'

=== need I say more...

Optional type safety....

It's debugger is so bare bones and liable to crash as to be better off spamming syslog with trace messages I mean you have a thousand times more capable debug and profiling system built into every browser

All php as a language has going for it is its devs are super cheap and you can get a quick prototype together before you have to rewrite it in a proper language/multiple services instead of one monolith held together by a shared session key.

So when the language itself is basically a box of wax crayons melted together, is it any wonder that what it spawns tends to be on the mutant ginger step child side of things???

having mastered a curly language syntax try a less brain damaged langauge, like java or c# or brainfuck you won't look back (pays better too ;-) or at least do what the stubborn php devs do and move into python or Pearl dev work, the boats sailed on Ruby and node)

[emfiliane]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

Well, if you want to write PHP 3, some of it will still work, though you'll get drowned in warnings.

If you want to seriously argue that PHP 8 is PHP 3, actual PHP developers are going to laugh in your face and call you a dinosaur, just like the few companies and hacks left who still try to munch their way through ancient code and never update their skills. So many of The Register's Commentariat read like time travelers from 2003.

PHP 3 was a terrible language, only marginally better than its competitors of the day (VBScript, Coldfusion, and SSI) and it's evolved along with its new competitors, even evolved an entirely new coherent syntax and standard library that everyone is supposed to use now. For over a decade, in fact.

Of course, if PHP doesn't do it for you, you could pick your favorite flavor of server-side Javascript framework, that seems to be The Thing nowadays.

[chuBb.]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

Php8 is a baby step in right direction will give you that, it's only missing the last 20 years of progress in serverside tech stacks instead of 25

Unfortunately it still massively lags behind the competition on all fronts, and very rarely do I see a new system implemented in php, go seems to be choice in containerised front ends these days, so realistically it's a legacy language which will carry on in undeath powering WordPress and causing headaches forever more

while Php8 may exist most things people use (WordPress etc. are hobbled at what ever attempt at coding the worst plugin uses) realistically until the big projects go all in on php8 php is stuck at lowest compatible version they support

Seriously don't try and defend the indefensible, literally anything but php is better serverside these days, christ I even rate java higher than php serverside and I hate tomcat and xml config with a passion

[Tom 7]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

There might be better languages out there for the job but the developers have not produced anything quite as easy or as powerful as PHP for ASP. I keep trying different things and after a while I return to PHP for hacking things quickly. The language is a bit it dshit but not so shit as you cant encapsulate the shit bits and once you've done that it doesnt get in your way or impose obscure restrictions that seem to crop up in most other ASP type frameworks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

PHP was flavour of the month when I learned it, in the mid-2000s. At the same time, so was MySQL, which sadly turned out not to be the most robust of the free software / open source databases. The problem was that both of these seemed to have picked up a lot of mindshare and so dominated for a long time in a slightly too much of an "everyone else is doing it, so why don't we" sort of way, although both perhaps not best suited to the roles that they ended up filling.

PostgreSQL now has growing mindshare as a database, at least, but I'm not sure if there has been a clear successor in terms of server side languages (and there is an awful lot of PHP stuff out there, some of it, as correctly noted, quite ancient, badly coded or otherwise having a bad smell; at least killing off the 'mysql_' functions probably was the excuse needed to get rid of a lot of the oldest worst stuff, or, perhaps, even worse, it is still running on an ancient PHP version on an equally ancient OS (gulp) on some sites).

Perl was always perhaps a bit too quixotic for mass adoption or for use by less experienced developers (although it did fill an important role for quite some time); Python, although it seems to have done a good job of replacing Perl as a general Swiss-army-knife, just doesn't seem to have gained all that much mindshare as a server side language or basis for CMS systems (and while I'm all for clean readable code, please still give me curly brackets any day over just whitespace); Java is perhaps a bit heavyweight and again perhaps not particularly easy for less experienced developers; which all sadly nowadays seems to lead us to…

…JavaScript being used in perhaps inappropriate places, with an increasingly insane number of libraries from an ever-growing number of multiple, multiple external sites being dragged in, and quite probably just as much of a mess and as many security holes as earlier PHP, yuk!

So, yes, perhaps ideally we do need a new, secure, readable, and (reasonably) easy to learn language to replace PHP, but what would it be?

[bombastic bob]

Re: Shut it down when the money runs out?

I wonder if it's even possible to write nice PHP

maybe it's because code like the kind _I_ write is never seen by most people...

either that or your semantics of what "nice PHP" is might be the defining factor. If you think of it as a programming language, rather than a web page filtering language, you might be greatly disappointed...

(I would much rather do server-side PHP-based things in lieu of browser-based javascript ANY time, and do as a matter of fact, whenever possible).

The kinds of things I like the best are when I get pages to post back to themselves (but with a GET or POST variable assigned to something) to a) show a "loading" or "waiting" screen, then b) refresh to the actual screen once the server-side code finishes generating the output. For device control where there are expected delays, this works VERY well. Simliarly you could do this for database results or anything that takes more than 1 second to load.

(in PHP it is easy, though I have some helper functions i typiccally put in an include file)

essentially:

$thingy = !empty($_GET) ? $_GET["thingy"] : "";

...

if($thingy == "")

{

? >

some web page with this in the head

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0.1;url=/thingy.php?thingy=Y">

< ?php

exit;

}

etc.

(spaces after less-than and before greater-than added to avoid errors posting)

[mattaw2001]

PHP - a language without any theoretical basis, accretiating over the years

PHP - a language where the creator cheerfully tells people they had no formal training or systematic approach, that has double- trebled- quadrupled- multiple times over the years. And it seems every time they could have improved it or made it more systematic, the developers have not.

That only two people fully understand the internals of the JIT etc. - I buy that. And I doubt you could easily or practically create another interpreter for it (Hip Hop Virtual Machine, HHVM, while awesome, is not fully compatible with PHP, but is a great product/tool, vs. say Python, IPython, Jython, etc.).

[bombastic bob]

Re: PHP - a language without any theoretical basis, accretiating over the years

I do not seem to have any trouble understanding how PHP is intended to work.

It is actually a LOT like the early IIS design (but that was in C as I recall). In short, a Perl-like interpretive language that has flexible named indexes for arrays and acts mostly like an HTML filtering language.

combine it with 'shell_exec' external utilities (written in whatever) and clever use of URLs and parameters, it's VERY powerful (and flexible).

But it's not really a "general programming" lingo.

[Clausewitz 4.0]

All Modern Digital Infrastructure

>"the future of the language depends on two people, namely Popov and Dmitry Stogov"

A Must meme quote: https://xkcd.com/2347/

One more whole ecosystem of apps of the modern age depending on 2 guys and nobody minding to pay them. Well done.