On toxicity in the PHP community
I’ve been working professionally with PHP for over 10 years now and fondly remember the days where we had to choose between Zend Framework Beta 0.8 and writing our own framework. (Spoiler: everyone chose the latter).
Luckily, our community has since evolved -albeit slightly- into a more mature and open-minded collective of software professionals who are less averse to using other people’s code. A lot of the credit for this goes to Composer, our beloved package manager, and PHP-FIG and their nice collection of PHP Standards Recommendations (PSR for short). Put this layer of standards on top of the sweet improvements we got in PHP7 and packages with exemplar documentation like Laravel and you can already feel this community is set up for greatness.
Despite all the maturity in our community there are still some things that annoy me on an almost daily basis.
If you follow /r/PHP on Reddit you often run into the good old framework wars at which point I just imagine a bunch of primates flinging faeces at each other to try and prove that theirs smells like rose petals. And then I see things like this:
Think about this for a second. This is a community leader who is the main driving force behind one of the biggest PHP frameworks today, using a flaky statistic like Github Stars to not just promote his own work, but to belittle the work of two other major frameworks that drive our language.
It seems like we have already forgotten that Laravel was originally inspired by CodeIgniter and has used various Symfony packages since version 4.
I can understand how some of the aforementioned faeces-flingers can get to you when the prime subject of their ‘debate’ is a piece of code you have dedicated the last 6 years of your life to, but that doesn’t mean you have to start scooping up your own excrements and join the battle. I’m confident we are all mature enough to ignore these and collaborate instead.
But wait, there’s more! Against my better judgement I dove into the twitter replies. There are generally three kinds of responses to these passive aggressive rebukes:
- Your framework is bad and you should feel bad!
Pushing back even more only increases the tension and further divides our community. Please don’t. - Yeah, f*ck the haters. You’re the best Taylor. xoxo
Let’s not applaud people who are actively contributing to belittling the hard work of others. No matter how valuable their contributions. - Can we stop acting like babies and embrace each other’s work?
I think I like this strategy more.
And then there is always this guy:
Clearly, the difference between size/complexity and speed is not fully clear to some. Most likely this tweet proves that Varnish is great.
To further clarify my point, here’s a nice example from a week ago:
Recently Fabien Potencier, the Symfomy project lead, started publishing a series on the upcoming Symfony 4:
https://medium.com/@fabpot/fabien-potencier-4574622d6a7e
https://medium.com/@fabpot/symfony-4-monolith-vs-micro-52dc6b98c0c5
https://medium.com/@fabpot/symfony-4-best-practices-b4bbd6a9c994
I got really excited about the direction Symfony is headed in and I’m looking forward to what other changes they will be bringing to the table. However, some of the first reactions I read on Twitter were along the line of: “This is just trying to copy Laravel”. How is this helping us as a community?
When I look at the last 10 years, the biggest improvements to how we work as PHP developers have come from people collaborating and feeding off of each other’s ideas. Let’s not ruin our momentum with petty fights and move forward together, embrace PSR’s, share packages and most of all, stop mindlessly criticising each other’s work and try to get inspired by the great things they are achieving with it.