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Sounds like disruption: lower quality on the metrics that mainstream programmers care about; and targeting non-consumption (i.e. making programming accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to). People who don't have access to anything are delighted to have something. Therefore, PHP gets a foothold even though it's lower quality. This is the beginning of disruption. The next part of disruption is improvement. And PHP is improving. At the same time, other programming systems are improving - C#, python, ruby, objective-C even Java has improved (generics etc). So it might seem that PHP will never catch up - which is probably true. But the crucial disruptive insight is that it mightn't need to: programmers might not all need all the extra improvements in mainstream languages, for all tasks. One piece of evidence is that PHP itself is already good enough for some tasks. For any advanced functionality, it's often possible to think of use-cases that wouldn't benefit from it. This means that it's possible for mainstream languages to "overshoot" what most programmers require for most tasks (to "overserve" them, like serving more food to someone who's already full). But, you might say, mainstream users are increasing in their ability to use advanced functionality as they learn more, so they can use the extra functionality (the patrons' stomachs are getting bigger). The interesting possibility is that the rate of improvement of mainstream languages may be faster than the rate of increase in the ability of programmers to use it (the servings getting bigger faster than the patron's stomachs are) - disruptive research has found that this is usually the case. It's because companies developing competitive products work really hard at improving them (to remain competitive); but consumers don't like to change their behaviour that fast. The final stage of disruption is that programmers leave their mainstream language, and switch to PHP because although it's not as good, it's good enough for their task, and it has other benefits (not sure what they are for PHP, but for disruption it's usually: cheaper, more convenient, simpler - the latter two are true of PHP, but as it adds functionality, it would seem it must lose them. It will just copy mainstream languages). But I can't imagine this happening, so therefore either disruption doesn't apply in this case (perhaps because a company isn't running PHP? Or because programmers themselves are unusually competitive and early-adopting, and even if some don't want to change their behaviour that quickly, there's another generation coming up real fast? Or as I said above, PHP can't retain its simplicity of being a template language while adding advanced features) - or my imagination is lacking. |