On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:48:56 +0100, Gerrit <gerrit(a)nl.linux.org> wrote:
And then
we'd have lots of people complaining that they
can't code in Python, and that we should be using Java or Ruby or
something. You can't satisfy every programmer, everyone has their own
preferences.
This is only partially true.
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).
Unfortunately
it seems most programmers on Wikipedia would rather think
of excuses, complain about the lack of progress and file bug reports.
Nobody needs an "excuse" not to contribute to Mediawiki. Mediawiki is
OSS. Nobody is obliged to contribute. If nobody contributes, nothing
happens. That's Open Source.
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.
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. 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.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]