phpvikinger.org: Things that have no name

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Saturday, June 24. 2006

phpvikinger.org: Things that have no name

Right now I am in Skien, which is somewhere in the middle of the dark forests of Norway. Skien, a bustling town of a whopping 45.000 people is the seventh largest municipiality in Norway, and also the home of the PHP Vikinger Unconference.

My part on this Unconference was to hold a Nontalk, a session where I asked the audience to come up with things that they think are typical for Everyday PHP use and that currently do not have a name.

The following stuff are the slightly edited and commented notes I made in front of the audience while moderating our session.
Things that have no name
The mission: I want you together with me to collect stuff and build a taxonomy of things that are special to a PHP programming culture, and then to name these things to make them searchable and to enable reflection on them.

The method: Brainstorm me. Anything goes. I am keeping onscreen notes for all of us.


Language properties
Popular PHP constructs and properties that are not often seen elsewhere.

  • Reliance on plain names for functionality, not special characters as in perl.

  • There is just one kind of array: Every array is a hash, every hash is an array.

  • Using hashes to replace complex switches.

  • Hashes have order.

  • Hashes as a method of passing named parameters.

  • Using hash keys to store the important information.

    • $counts[$name] = 1;

    • split this, sort this, map this, grep this.



    • Love array_flip() instead of searching values in an array.

    • Flip twice to get uniqueness.





A thing to do and try:

  • Mapping ideoms from different programming languages onto each other would be an interesting project.



Ideas

  • The one core value of PHP is the idea of of simplicity. Things should be plain ad straightforward as possible.

  • "Dumbing it down"

    • Make a complex such as SOAP servers concept accessible.

    • Provide convenience functions.

    • Provide a prepackaged smart path to enable users to get quick results.



  • PHP is written with language driven development in mind. Tool driven ("Eclipse style") development is possible, but PHP should be useful without any other tools.

    • Eliminating redundant code.

    • Eliminating redundant tasks. (Example given by Rasmus: You can force types, but you don't have to).

    • The network is becoming a first class API. This is a fancy way to put the fact that PHP tries to treat POST/GET data as part of the environment.

    • "Fear of layers." Use the most "hands on" approach to get the job done.

    • Layers are good to make concepts clear. Being able to cut through layers is good for making things possible. PHP thrives on the concept of "Leaky abstractions."

    • PHP is extensible. "PHP is the borg. It can assimilate anything out there and add it to its own perfection."

    • "Deployment model favors loosely coupled parts." Large scale PHP applications naturally drift to shared nothing models.



    Methods

    • Deployment model forces scaling by request than scaling by active session. Shared Nothing Architectures are favored. Rasmus: "Pushing the scalabilty requirements down to the components."

    • Use C as an implementation language and PHP as a glue language. PHP modules are favored over PHP libraries.



    Tradition

    • "PHP is for the web. It was born on the web." It can be used as a general purpose language, but it cannot forget where it was born.

    • "As in Perl, there is more than one way to do it. But there is a preferred standard way and we can make that one easily accessible."

    • "PHP is a presentation language. Use compiled languages to do the heavy lifting."

    • "The message of PHP is 'You can write it yourself.' PHP is easily accessible, while not locking out the experts."

    • "PHP is not a religion, it focuses on getting the job done, not on doing it the right or even in a beautiful way."



    Alan Kay: "Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible."

    Failures

  • We do not make the secure way of doing things easier and more obvious than the other ways (But there is a filter extension as part of PHP 6, currently in PECL).

  • We have not adapted our ways in a way to cope with the more hostile environent the internet has become.

  • Inconsistency in language and module design. Is that really a problem? Or are you simply using the wrong IDE? Obviously it is not a barrier to entry.



Feature requests

  • We are still missing array_flip($orig)["someval"] syntax.

  • Sara wants "do() or throw new Exception", to match do() or die().



On Frameworks

  • Frameworks try to make data native to PHP, for example import tables from a DB into native PHP variables and vice versa.

  • Frameworks try to supply a structure to your code. Rasmus: "Everybody needs a framework in the sense of supplying rules and structure. It is just that not everybody needs the same framework. 'Getting rich with PHP' is not an anti-framework talk."


Posted by Kristian Köhntopp in Community, PHP at 13:50 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (2)

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PHP Vikinger
The PHP Vikinger event was a great success. It was skillfully guided by Zak Greant who did such a great job orginizing it. Since this was the first PHP event I attended and the fist unconference, I cannot really compare with "regular" conferences, but
Weblog: Edin Kadriba?i?'s personal blog
Tracked: Jun 27, 23:02
PHP Deployment Model
In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after. I could not agree more. At the 3rd Eu
Weblog: Sebastian Bergmann
Tracked: Sep 05, 11:25

Comments
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One thing is missing: lambda() has a strange name: create_function()
#1 Lars Strojny (Homepage) on 2006-10-03 23:25 (Reply)
And an awful syntax, too.
Creating anonymoun functions like with lambda() in LISP is definitly not fun in PHP.
#1.1 Florian Laws (Homepage) on 2006-10-10 19:42 (Reply)

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You can turn it on with FLUSH PRIVILEGES once the tables exist.

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