During the /dev/hell podcast at Tek12, someone asked the guys their opinion about PSR. I did not know what PSR was by that name. A quick search lead me to the Google Group named PHP Standards Working Group. I had vaguely remembered a consortium of frameworks, libraries and applications that were organizing to attempt to make their projects cooperate better. But, this did not sound like the same project. Another search and I found the PHP Framework Interoperability Group on Github. A bit more searching led me to a post where apparently the PHP FIG changed their name at some point citing people not knowing what FIG meant. But, this is not a history post. The group had done some work on setting a standard for auto loaders in PHP. This is a very good thing and much needed. That is a real thing that impacts real developers.
The person asking the question had asked about PSR1 and PSR2. These are the first two standards proposals in the group and they deal with coding standards. There were mixed feelings in the room about the proposals. I asked (being me, probably with very little tact) why in 2012 were a group of really smart people still discussing coding standards such as tabs vs. spaces. Because this is what immediately came to mind for me.
Source: http://xkcd.com/927/
There are already coding standards for PHP and any other language out there. Why does anyone need to make a new one? For Phorum we chose the PEAR standard (ok, with 2 minor modifications). On top of that, every one of the projects in this group already have coding standards. Why not just pick one of those? Are 10 projects that currently have their own standards going to actually all change to something else? I highly doubt it. My guess is that, at best, they will all end up with a modified version of the groups standards.
This reminds me a lot of Open Source licenses. There are tons of these things. And in the end, most (GPL has its issues I know) of the open source licenses represent the same idea. I suppose you could say that most of all of them fall into GPL like or BSD like. Anyhow, I quit worrying about having my own license years ago. I now just use a BSD style license that you can generate with several online BSD license generators.
When I voiced my concern about what is, in my opinion, a waste of very smart people's time, my good friend Cal Evans (He has bled in my car. So, I think he is my friend. And I hope he feels the same.) said that I was misunderstanding the point of the group. It was a group of projects that were collaborating to try and use similar standards and practices to make the PHP OSS community better. And that is exactly what I thought PHP FIG was. However, the group name is now "PHP Standards Working Group". That reminds me of the W3C HTML Working Group. And in my mind that means a group that is deciding the future of a technology. In addition the proposal being discussed is titled "PSR-1, a standard coding convention for PHP". If you pair that with the name of the group, it sounds very authoritative. And I don't think that is by accident. If I was heading up such an effort, I would hope that every PHP developer on the planet would follow it too. If you saw Terry Chay's keynote at the PHP Community Conference last year, he talked about frameworks and platforms. He pointed out that the reason people like Facebook were sharing their data center technology was in hopes that people would start using it and it would become common. Thus meaning the equipment they are custom building would be cheaper and people they hire would already be familiar with it. But, if the point of the group is *only* cooperation between lage OSS PHP projects, I wish they would pick a name that is more indicative of that. As it stands, when I landed on the page, my immediate assumption was that this groups intention was to dictate to the rest of the PHP world how to write their PHP code.
In the end, cooperation is good. And if these guys want to cooperate I say more power to them. I just hope they get into really good things soon. Like, can we talk about a maximum number of files, functions or classes used for any one single page execution? *That* would be valuable to the PHP community. I can deal with funny formatting. I can't deal with poorly performing code that his dragged down in abstracton and extension. Or how about things like *never* running queries inside loops that are reading results from another query. That would be a great thing to make examples of and show people the best practices. Tabs vs. spaces? That should have been solved 10 years ago. When in doubt, PHP code should do what the PHP core does. This is PHP we are talking about. Would it not make sense to have the people who write PHP writing code that is somewhat similar in style to those that make PHP? C and PHP syntax are very, very similar. So, why don't we all just refer to the PHP CODING_STANDARDS file when in doubt and not even worry with the little stuff that does not affect performance?
So, as of a few minutes ago, I have joined the group. If for no other reason, just to see what is discussed. Perhaps I should follow the advice I give people when they ask for features in my projects and do something about my issues and worries.