Re: Why is PHP so popular? What can we learn from the PHP camp?

On Mon, 5 May 2003 19:43:37 +0900, Pablo Lorenzzoni
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>If we want, some day, to overpass Ruby firstly we should create a know-it-all 
>source for information (just like php manual). It's easy to learn PHP since 
>either beginners or wizards always can refer to php manual since it have 
>everything.

I actually think this is exactly the key.

Unlike most of you here, I don't have huge pre-Ruby experiences with
programming languages. Sure, I coded in various Basic dialects in the
80s and very early 90s, picked up some Pascal around the same time,
but really, I never was what I would call more than a "causal hobby
programmer". For instance, I never got into C, and yes, I tried a few
times throughout the 80s. Just wasn't my thing: it didn't "speak" to
me (or rather, I didn't "speak it").

My background is journalism (not in the English speaking area) and
community management/development, so I never needed to know any
prigramming languages. I did want to throw together my own quick
utilities/script for certain tasks when the available tools or
applications didn't do the trick and I grew tired of having to find
someone to write them for me, so I frequently looked at newer
languages, hoping to some day find one that appeals to me. I
discovered Ruby about two years ago, found that the code bits I saw
"made sense" (to me, a non-programmer) and I decided that Ruby is
going to be "my tool". 

However, I didn't know the basics, so I started to look for literature
-- and found very little that was useful to me, a complete novice. I
spent many hours blankly looking at scripts written by others, reading
the same passages of the early chapters of the Pickaxe book numerous
times and slowly got the hint an idea. Ironically, those 15 years old
"Basic basics" did help with this, and of course, something like
string.include?("foo") is something even a non-programmer understands
simply by looking at it.

But all in all, I was still stumbling around blindly until I got my
hands on a copy of Mark Slagell's "Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days"
(this title does the book great injustice). That changed things
drastically. I -understood- the way Mark explained things and he did
it gently enough to teach me the fundamentals -- and got me started
with his book. Once I comprehended the basics, I also started to
understand a bit more of this newsgroup's content (I have actually
read and achieved it faithfully every day for nearly two years, even
though there is still a lot of stuff that goes right over my head!),
and the Pickaxe became an actual resource rather than something I knew
was important but that didn't help me much.

Many moons later, the situation is only slightly better. There finally
*is* an online tutorial, Daniel Carrera's "Learning Ruby", and the
Windows installer of Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt is a heavenly gift for
those of us who need someone to help us with the baby steps. I would
not be here today and would not use Ruby as an essential tool for
every day task's if it wasn't for this installer. However, compared to
what PHP offers to interested neophytes, these are drops of water on a
hot rock.

PHP is so popular that even kids at ages 14 or 15 pick up PHP basics
and use it for their personal web pages (whether or not they need it).
It's uncommon to find a teenager on the web today who doesn't know at
least some HTML, and the "logical next step" to them seems to be PHP
or Perl. Just yesterday I had a sixteen year old walk up to me and ask
if I could help with a Perl question. Hell, of course not! I mentioned
Ruby, and of course the kid never heard of it. A good friend of mine,
a writer, started to pick up Perl because "it seems useful" ... and
while I know that she'd understand Ruby better, she isn't interested
because it's not popular and there is so very few easy-to-understand
Ruby resources available.

The point being ... if someone wants to learn PHP or Perl, there are
literally dozens of beginner-friendly tutorials out there, and new
ones are written daily. There are plenty of starter books, countless
web sites. I'm talking about tutorials not only for people -- like
most of you -- who know at least one other language (and often more
than that, backed by sound IT/CS education), but the "average" person
who doesn't know what a command line (thankfully, I was born early
enough to know what computers without GUI were/are like ;) is and to
whom you have to explain what a variable and an array is (you know:
"an array is like a shopping bag, you can throw in different items,
take them out, replace them with another item, etc"). 

If you want popularity, you need to provide more beginner-friendly
tutorials and doumentation. You probably also need more technical
material for the more advanced folks, those who come from other
languages. But I think Ruby will eventually reach those anyway, since
it convinces with quality. The "mass market" is another story
altogether. I'm not sure if that market is a target at all, but well,
PHPs popularity is at least partly based on its availability and
accessibility to/by "the average guys".

By the way, the mswin32 port of 1.6.8. is still the version that's
distributed as latest stable version -- in the Windows One Click
Installer for example. There is a good chance that this will be the
version that curious average-people who happen to hear about Ruby will
find and download. Let's just the say the IO of this version and this
port is not very thrilling. Processing a 280 MB text file (just very
simple regexp matching) took an embarassing 1097 seconds in 1.6.8. In
1.7.3 it was 53 seconds and 1.8.0p2 completed the job done in 34s. 

Now, if I had tried to write/execute that script in 1.6.8, and it
would have been my first experience with Ruby, it would definitely
also have been my last experience with Ruby. (I read about these
problems here in the group back when they were first reported -- but
the average person who "plays a bit" with Ruby won't be reading
comp.lang.ruby or the list.) Perhaps this should be "fixed" or
replaced with a different version.

Anyway, I'm rambling! Sorry about that. :) (Yes, my scripts are
appropriately elaborate too -- working on that!)  In summary, I think
tutorials and better documention are primary keys to success and
"popularity" ... and with popularity comes the jobs.

-M.