On Sat, 20 Nov 2004 16:48:56 +0100, Gerrit gerrit@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.