I commend Waldemar and Thomas for announcing their decision so that someone else can take the reigns, rather that letting things die slowly and quietly.
On the other hand, I can't help but think that "development halted" and "no longer maintained"[1] headlines do the Django community a disservice, as evidenced by comments here[2] asking if Django is dead.
Django is alive, active, and serving many of us very well, thank you. IMHO the reason you don't hear much about it compared to the latest hot shit framework is because it usually "just works", leaving us more time to deal with more important things, like actual business problems.
When will people realize that the main reason PHP was/is so successful has nothing to do with the language? PHP got huge because it's free and super easy to deploy on commodity-level hosting. Ubiquity breeds popularity.
Basing a reboot on the JVM makes little sense in this context.
That said, you lost me at "less ';' like in javascript".
IMO you are only partially right and some of PHP's success does have to do with the language and not just availability.
As horrible as PHP is, it is really easy to sit down with PHP and a tutorial or a book and start banging out code that gives you instant results. PHP is like the MS Basic 2.0 of the web era -- people who aren't really programmers (yet?) can sit down with it and GTD right away -- their code may be ugly but they can see it working as they go. They don't have to learn what a 'WAR' directory is and how it is structured, they don't have to mess around with xml configurations, etc. The ubiquity helps, certainly, but IMO the reason it got ubiquitous is how easy it is to go from nothing to "hello web world".
I think a project that maintains this instant GTD environment but improves the language is actually quite a good idea, though I also think cutting ties with PHP by giving it a new name makes more sense than calling it phpreboot and once you involve Java it seems less likely PHP's context-free easy start-up will be maintained.
As horrible as PHP is, it is really easy to sit down with PHP and a tutorial or a book and start banging out code that gives you instant results...
You could say the same thing about ASP, or even ColdFusion.
I'd argue that those instant results had more to do with the higher availability of PHP on cheap web hosts, than the accessibility of the language itself.
That's exactly right. I learned to code from a PHP book a decade ago, and now I am using the excellent OOP Symfony2 PHP Framework. The full spectrum of options are already available with PHP, the language and its frameworks lack nothing.
It lacks a coherent design philosophy; it's a collection of hacks; a house of cards with no style. It's full of idiosyncrasies that must be memorized because they make no logical sense. Put simply, it completely lacks taste.
Right, and under the category of easily:
What languages do you already know,
What languages are you already actually comfortable using for a large scale project, and
What is the production server running.
If the answer to all of the above is PHP, then you're going to get projects done faster there than you would in Python or Ruby.
Being able to do something like install Apache with modphp in one go and then just put a file into the correct directory and have it execute code is without a doubt the most low barrier way to get started. Other languages are catching up though, but taking a different route (e.g. hosted platforms like Heroku).
Funny article, but it misses the fact that GitHub's pricing is less about code separation, and more about access management.
There's nothing stopping a customer from cramming several projects into a single Git repository. You could theoretically take advantage of GitHub's "unlimited" storage for cheap this way. The problem is, you need separate repositories if you want to manage access for different collaborators.
Folders aren't expensive, but access management can be. Github understands this, which is why their Business plans, which are differentiated by having finer-grained access control features, are more expensive.
Would be nice if there it was bundled with sample patched fonts, so those wanting to try it could see if it's worth the trouble to patch a font.