PHP is Doomed? Part II

I have put some additional thought into the troubles facing PHP, and what occurred to me is that we have seen, in the last ten years, a major shift in the way innovation in programming languages make it to the market.

In the past, new languages simply superceded old ones. Older technologies became relegated to supporting old systems, while new systems were created using new technologies. High level contructs replaced low level ones.

That model has changed. Software groups started to release new versions of programming languages and tools on a regular basis. Did it happen in response to customer needs? Because software companies realized that the languages and tools represented core intellectual property that they wanted to protect rather than just productivity tools? Did the rising complexity of software fuel a desire by business to stay on the same platform as long as possible? Those questions are outside the scope of my post, but I think everyone can speculate about the reasons for this shift.

New languages are no longer simply replacing older ones. New languages are occupying new space (and some existing space). The effect is an increasing fragmentation around the edges of the software industry. Call it the Tower of Babel effect.  At the same time, the industry is working extremely hard to standardize around a handful of general purpose technologies and languages like XML and Javascript, and commercial entities are lining up behind two major technologies- Java and .NET. That argument is a bit of an oversimplification, as large enterprises use a variety of technologies, but at a high level that is what is happening. In the industry, we have a largely unified center of software languages, and a totally fractured periphery. 

Because of this state of affairs, sponsorship by a major industry enterprise or group has become a necessity for mainstream programming languages. That does not mean that everything outside the corporate world is doomed. Open source languages like Perl, Python and Ruby can still thrive if there is enough organized sponsorship by universities, governments, and other non-commercial entities. But as languages become more complex and tools become more sophisticated, it will become more and more difficult for these languages to compete with commercial offerings from companies that spend billions of dollars per year on organized R & D.

In the competition for mindshare among software engineers and technology managers, the question for PHP and all other programming languages outside the center is whether that language continues to appeal to new audiences in an ever more crowded periphery. For languages in the center, the question is how to continue to provide enough innovation to keep the language at the center and not have it relegated to the periphery.

I thought about breaking down programming languages by industry, platform, and sector to uncover centers and peripheries in individual market segments, but that would take more time than I have to dedicate. If anyone knows someone looking for a research topic for a graduate degree, feel free to tell them to run with the idea. I'd love to see how things break down.