… it’s more likely than you think!
And here I thought drama was isolated to fandom mailing lists and MySpace!
I was not at php
tek this year. I keep meaning to make it to that conference, but, let’s face it, the week before Memorial Day is a really lousy time to have a conference. I usually like to take that Friday off to make it a long weekend. I may finally make tek next year, though. But, even if I went, I don’t usually get invited to the cool parties. It’s really for the best, though. I usually end up drunk in a bar listening to good music rather than trying to discuss functions and benchmarking after having imbibed a large quantity of booze or making an ass out of myself by diving into bushes. Ask me about that some other time.
Apparently, at php
tek, at one of these “cool-people-only” parties (okay, it was apparently an after-hours panel), a bunch of people cooked up this idea of having a uniform PHP coding standards amomg their own projects with the goal of having them adopted as some type of official standard. Now, in and of itself, this sounds like a good idea. Most other languages have at least a suggested best practices (Sun’s coding conventions for Java or Apple’s for Cocoa come to mind) even if you don’t use them. Every job I’ve worked in has had some standard, even if I had to write it. Most of them were derived from the PEAR standard, including what we do at dealnews. But hey, variety is the spice of life, right? What’s the harm in another choice?
Nothing. So we’ve established that the idea of havng a[nother] PHP coding standard is not necessarily bad. The problem, as with all things, is what happened next…
Somehow, they managed to get a closed mailing list on php.net. Think about that for just a second. This group, composed of some guys from some projects with no official relation to PHP other than being users of it, somehow ended up with
[email protected]. WTF? I would love to know how that happened.More to the point, this will cause conceptual confusion among new, and even existing users. When I first heard about this, my first thought was, hey, this is on PHP.net, right? It must have some kind of official recognition, right? Well, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t. It’s just … some guys. Put yourself in the shoes of a new PHP user, visiting PHP.net for all your manual needs. Oh, what’s this? Standards? Well, I better use those!
It was a suspiciously closed action for such an open-source project. The original mailing list was a closed list until Rasmus himself opened it, and the members don’t exactly seem keen on welcoming any input from anyone outside their little clique.Some of the things being said by the “PHP Standards Group,” quite frankly, make me very suspicious of their motives. Things like “All of us are too busy, both with real jobs and our various projects, to fight the battles that come of trying to make this a completely open process where anyone with an email address can contribute” reek of self-aggrandizing nonsense.
I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. Plain and simple. And the fact that no one else in the group has stood up to say otherwise speaks volumes. There’s a phenomenon that I have seen occur on mailing list called implicit acceptance. If you don’t stand up and say otherwise, you are implicitly agreeing with the stated course of action. So, if anyone in this group disagrees with the stated opinions, guys, now’s the time to pony up.
If you’re going to have a mailing list on php.net, and call yourselves the “PHP Standards Group,” you need to welcome input from the PHP community - all of us - not just your group. Otherwise, you don’t need to be on php.net, and you don’t need to be calling yourselves the “PHP Standards Group.”
It is overly focused on OO. I know a lot of people think that objects are the answer to everything. I have strong disagreements, but I will save those for a later post. But (kind of tying into my previous point) there are a _lot _of people using PHP in a strictly functional way or in a way that sanely mixes functional and object oriented programming. Any standard - if it’s going to be called a PHP Standard - needs to take all widespread uses of PHP into accout, and not just OO.
Now, as I said before, I’m not a “cool person.” I don’t have CVS commit access. I don’t have thousands of followers on Twitter or a cool blog (no offense to my five regular readers - you guys rule and I’ll buy you a round sometime!). I’m just some guy who’s been writing PHP for the last nine years or so. So, while it appears this “group” probably won’t care what I have to say anwyays, here is my humble suggestion for a path forward.**
**Figure out the semantics. **Notice that all this stuff we’re talking is appearances and semantics. Nobody is discussing the actual proposals (as they have been made) so far, just the actions of the people involved. What exactly is this project trying to accomplish? Are you trying to write a standard for your project(s), or are you trying to produce something useful for the community? If this is just for your project(s), move it off php.net, call it something else (“The Shared Standards Working Group” or some other such nonsense), and do whatever the hell you want. But if you’re going to call yourselves the “PHP Standards Group,” and have your project on PHP.net, you have to welcome input from the community, even if you ultimately discard it.
The thing I don’t understand is why this group appears so afraid of public input? Okay, the signal-to-noise ratio can get pretty high sometimes, sure. But for every ten, hundred or five hundred bogus suggestions you get, you may get one really good one. One you might not have thought of yourself or no one in your tight little circle might have seen. And this is the true power of any open-source project. I would urge the “PHP Standards Group” to overcome their fear of public input and let us - the users - have an input in the community process.
As always, this represents my own views only, and not those of my employer, the beer I’m drinking (Fat Tire Amber) or my cat.
