The biggest bottleneck: developer time, not double quotes

It’s hard to drag a community the size of PHP’s towards such things as standards and using frameworks. From my experience many PHP developers still struggle/refuse to adopt others standards.

When I started PHP, PEAR didn’t exist, and even when it did (and probably even today) much of community is used to “rolling their own” solutions for 99% of tasks. Most developers I’ve worked with don’t trust/use PEAR classes and I can’t really blame them. Most early efforts were authored by developers who at the time didn’t really grasp the OO concept and made god classes.

The Ruby community has one up here, their community was kick started by Rails – many good programming practices have been spoon fed from the start. Couple this with Ruby probably not being many Ruby-newbies first language. I digress…

In every company I’ve worked at the code re-use has been low because “every problem is different”. Now this isn’t normally true, the nucleus of the project is but the rest is made up of much of the same stuff tackled on every project (database abstraction, session management, form validation, data sanitisation, the list goes on…).

What holds the PHP community back from adopting frameworks and standards is the obsession with macro optimisation (e.g. ++$i vs $i++). Just check the comments in the manual on language basics, or most forums – how long has the single vs double quote debate been running?

I’ve read threads about removing white space and pre-processing include/require statements to speed up execution. Neither of these would address the true bottleneck in an application.

In my experience, only in circumstances where the coding has been exceptionally poor, has PHP been a bottleneck. The majority of the the time it’s the database that you’ll run up against before seeing any PHP performance issues. This obsession with squeezing performance, before performance is an issue, scares most developers off the idea of using a “bloaty” framework, and they go back to re-inventing the wheel again.

When the larger community becomes seasoned enough and recognises the biggest bottleneck is developer time and not double quotes then hopefully we’ll see some proper standards materialise.