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0 pointssmacktoward14y ago0 comments

I think it has more to do with the usual background of each language's programmers. Perl coders (especially Back In The Day) tended to disproportionately come to Perl from systems administration backgrounds; package management is something that sysadmins are used to worrying about, so they created a strong culture of package management in Perl early on. PHPers on the other hand tend disproportionally to come from web design/HTML+CSS backgrounds, which haven't exposed them to the problems that a good package manager is designed to solve. So package management in PHP has never been a priority.

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wvenable14y ago· 1 in thread

The long lack of namespacing probably hurt the adopting of package management in PHP but also it seems like overkill. I use an occasional PEAR package, but I always just download the source and integrate it into the project that way. It seems like more work to go through a package manager especially since I work on multiple different operating systems. It might also help that PHP packages tend to have very few dependencies.

Klinky14y ago

I think it may seem like more work, but without strong package management things like reinventing the kitchen sink & copy pasta from various unreliable sources becomes the norm. You could almost say that the comments in the PHP manual were relied on more often than PEAR.

Although package management can cause it's own problems like dependency hell or multiple packages that do the same thing but none of them do it well.

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