A while back, Adam Bosworth began a talk at ICSOC by modestly declaring that he was humbled by more august speakers that preceded and followed his talk. While I personally believe that Adam was being unduly modest, as I really could not hold a technologist in higher regard (and was hugely pleased to meet him in person on Friday, if only briefly), in my case this was more of a literal truth. While speaking with my father, who’s not in the technology business, a couple of days before the conference I explained who some of the folks speaking here (Adam Bosworth, Marc Andreessen, Rod Smith, etc) actually were and his response was characteristically blunt: “So they’re all a lot more important than you.” Truer words were never spoken.
The point here is not, however, to try and ‘outhumble’ Adam but rather to highlight the very impressive roster that Zend had put together for this show. These folks are neither dumb nor looking for ways to kill time. And yet they chose to attend a smallish (compared to, say, JavaOne – attendance was reported to be in the 450 person range) conference full of scripters to speak and, in Rod’s case, sit on the panel I was fortunate enough to moderate. Why?
To anyone who saw my talk on Thursday, the answer’s rather predictable: PHP is succeeding, and remarkably so, because it’s not terribly complicated. It is, in fact, simple. You don’t have to take my word for it: Marc Andreessen and Rod Smith said that pretty much straight up here. Simplicity has, from the admittedly biased viewpoint of someone who just presented on the topic, made something of a comeback of late. The rise of PHP and other simple, dynamic languages such as Ruby speaks volumes to me about who’s winning the war between the humans and the computer scientists.
But don’t let anybody try and convince you that simplicity is only in vogue amongst technologists and language advocates; one has to assume, for example, that E-Trade, HP, and Philips didn’t independently arrive at the idea of branding themselves around simplicity for no reason. Where once simple was a perjorative, it has become a virtue. Simplicity tends to manifest itself very differently depending on context (unless you think that the AK-47 and the Creative Commons have a lot in common), but it tends to be something we recognize when we see it.
So simplicity was certainly an important theme to the conference; but the point that the Zend folks would prefer to emphasize, I’m sure, was the role PHP plays in business. In trotting out examples from Lufthansa to to eBay to NASA to PayPal to LiveJournal to Yahoo, the case for PHP within the enterprise was pretty compelling. Or in infrastructure software such as MediaWiki, Mambo, WordPress, or SugarCRM. While I didn’t get the chance to go to as many of the individual breakout sessions as I might have liked (duty called), I did get to see the majority of the main session keynotes and speak to a lot of interesting people. Rich Morrow, from Lockheed and working at NASA, noted that far from Lockheed having to push PHP on NASA, the organization that invented rocket science and astronauts actually mandated it. The lesson from where I sit was clear: PHP’s near infinite malleability makes it an ideal tool for a hell of a lot of business problems – the Long Tail of business problems, as I put it. Rod Smith’s keynote, for example, featured a demo of a wiki tool that mashed up Google Maps with NOAA weather data to anticipate hits on inventory in near real-time. Yes you read that right – it was a wiki based app.
Discussions of technology aside, however, the single most rewarding session of the conference for me was Adam’s closing keynote. Not because he’s bright – though he is – and not because I hadn’t heard the message before to some extent – I had, but because he was thinking beyond the technology to the difference it can make in people’s lives. One of the things I often lament to my friends, the majority of whom are employed in various socially rewarding disciplines – environmentalists, nurses, social workers, teachers, etc – is the lack of impact my day to day job has on the causes that I care about. Using his talk as a platform, Adam urged all of the PHP developers to think long and hard about the problems specifically associated with the healthcare situation, because that was their opportunity to “make a true and important difference in the world.” I can’t do it justice here – and am hopeful that Adam will post his talk – but I’d just say that I personally found it inspiring, and will need to think further about ways in which RedMonk can work with good causes.
Anyhow, I’d like to thank our customer Zend for the invitation to speak, and all of the folks that took the time to meet and speak with me at the conference.
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