Rowan Collins wrote:
To put it
easily: each language has a group of lovers, a group of
haters, and a lot of people in between. I would not be surprised if the
group of people in between is relatively small for PHP. I do not know
for sure, however.
I think you may just be assuming that your feelings are those of a
majority here. There are plenty of people who hate PHP, but there are
also plenty of people who love it; the same is true of Perl, Java,
C++, etc, etc. That you don't like the 'feel' of PHP is fine, but I
think it's a mistake to imagine that this is some kind of consensus
view (and I'm not trying to blame or insult you, by the way, it's a
natural psychological tendency to do that, I believe).
I don't think it is a consesus, and I would image people loving PHP to
be over-represented among Mediawiki hackers. My 'feeling' that I think
the feeling for PHP is stronger is not
Indeed. I think Tim is talking about those who say
"we really must
have a such-and-such feature, but I'm not going to code it,
because..." There are a lot more people generating even quite
well-designed ideas than people actually implementing them, and I
think the existing developers find that rather tiring. I'm probably
guilty of this kind of excuse myself, although I do have a go at the
odd bit of code occasionally.
I can understand it might be tiring for existing developers.
On the other hand, I can also understand not everyone with a good idea
has the time, resources, energy and wish to implement it.
Finally,
I'd like to ask you to stay polite. You are implicitly accusing
me of lying, because you do not believe that my reason to refrain from
contributing is PHP. You are free to disagree with me. However, I think
it would be best for everyone to keep the discussion fair.
I may be wrong, but I don't think such an accusation was intended.
OK. Let's close it now. Tim didn't mean it as such, as is clarified by
his later post, and I don't want to have a language war. I'll contribute
to Pywikipediabot: I know some features I'd like to see that I might be
able to implement.
The
point is that there's not a lot anyone can do about the fact that
people will not contribute because of language preferences, etc,
because there are always an infinite number of configurations, and
they'll always provide *somebody* with a valid excuse not to
contribute. So, yes, not liking PHP is a valid reason not to code in
it, but that's to do with *your* preferences, and doesn't really
reflect on the project or what anyone else should do.
There might be an infinite number of configurations, major ones and
minor ones. Here, I define major ones the ones that cannot be bridged,
and minor ones the one that can. For me, PHP is a major one. The coding
style in Pywikipediabot was a minor one.
Let's close this discussion, it's bringing us nowhere. I should have
read Tim's second post before replying, and maybe Tim could have phrased
things a bit differently - let us put those differences aside and edit
Wikipedia. We had our 400.000th article today - let's celebrate that!
kind regards,
Gerrit Holl.
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