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  • hexHex@kolektiva.social
    Oct 22, 2026, 7:37 AM

    RE: phpc.social/@afilina/117482632

    Imagine, for a moment, that someone built a community playground out of salvaged wood. It would be pretty cool. Kids come and play, but then kids start getting hurt. The people who built it don't understand safety. Boards rot and aren't replaced.

    More people come in, they help, and it's slightly better. But the whole thing was built on an old garbage heap. The sandbox is full of rusty nails and broken glass. Kids get cut when they dig.

    People criticize it, and other people get mad because it's a community project. They put in a lot of effort. No one else did it. It was filling a need, a real need, and people were just criticizing it.

    Other playgrounds are built, by other communities. They're actually safe. People are careful. They move more slowly. But everyone knows where the big playground is. It's easy to get to. Everything wants to just fix the playground. It's where everyone meets already. There are so many friends. It's not just the physical space, it's the social space.

    I understand the drive to defend open source, any open source, as such. There's so much invested. There are so many relationships. There are so many good memories. So many people learned PHP as their first language and have never learned anything else. It felt empowering to just jump in and build something. Feelings will always be more powerful than logic, regardless of what anyone says.

    The sunk cost fallacy is real, and so much more real when the investment has been so great. But not all projects are equal. The amount of effort it takes to keep a project going is not equal to quality of the output. Some projects just take more effort to keep going than others. Some projects take more effort than they're worth.

    At some point, I think the effort of keeping up with the bugs will be greater than we can sustain. We will simply have to abandon PHP as a language (like so many already have) and move on. It will be hard. Some people won't move on. They will keep going until they break and give up on the entire dream of open source, of building a better world together. That will be a huge loss for us all.

    I wonder what we can do to ease that transition, to support those who are experiencing such great grief and loss. What would a death doula look like for a programming language? For a community built around a programming language? How do you help someone let something go when it has become part of a person's identity?

    I think we need to answer these questions, sooner or later.

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Replies

  • hexHex@kolektiva.social
    Oct 22, 2026, 7:41 AM

    It would be hard to overstate the challenges of moving away from PHP. It has become the de facto language for so many open source projects. It's not simply that there's a huge sunk cost, it's that escaping that debt is also so incredibly daunting.

    It's not possible right now to just jump. It's going to take a lot of little efforts, and a lot of time. But we can be resilient. We can move through this.

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  • hexHex@kolektiva.social
    Oct 22, 2026, 7:44 AM

    And in the mean time, we will need to support each other. We will need to be gentle, kind, and understanding. We will need to listen. We will not be able to just turn off all the PHP things. We will need to find ways to keep things going as we figure out how to do things differently.

    This is good practice, because we have to do the same thing to escape capitalism.

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  • hexHex@kolektiva.social
    Oct 22, 2026, 10:14 AM

    It's also worth understanding that there are some communities that are simply toxic. Even if they do good things, even if they are welcoming.

    "But it's open source! Never criticize open source." This is a thought stopping mantra. If you love open source, you should criticize it and you should listen to criticism. Pay attention to how criticism is handled, think about how you handle criticism. Be kind, be gentle, but you shouldn't be afraid to be honest.

    Some criticism is not legitimate. It can be dismissed with facts. Some is, it can be acknowledged without invalidating the underlying premise of a project. But some communities can't do this. These are dangerous, even if they are otherwise doing good work.

    I have done my fair share of work in different communities. Some pull you in with their potential, and then they consume you. They drain you with endless chaos.

    There is only one you, and you only have so much time. What you choose to put yourself into matters. You matter.

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