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| Fig 1. A Bin |
Most days, I try to find some time to work on PHP. I consider it my mission to push this thing forward. Recently, I've also made it my mission to get your boss to pay you to push this thing forward.
One of the problems with this, that I hear all the time:
What if we allow one of our employees to spend a bunch of time working on a feature only for that feature to be refused ?
It looks like, I'm asking you to potentially waste your company resources on things that might never get voted into PHP.
How it Works
For those of you that don't know, I'm going to lay out the path for a feature, from inception to inclusion:
- You think of a feature (or borrow one from another language)
- You approach internals (by sending a mail to a mailing list or opening a PR)
- You try to gather consensus on the mailing list and the PR
- You request access to create a Wiki document (an RFC)
- You spend two weeks (at least) discussing the addition on internals and responding to feedback
- You open a vote, which lasts two weeks.
A two thirds majority (two yes votes for every no vote) is required for the feature to pass and be included.
Minimally then, I'm asking you to spend at least a month, likely taking up at least some time every day to respond to conversation on internals or queries on the pull request.
At the end of this, if the feature doesn't get voted in, have you wasted your time ?
The Question
Whether or not you feel like your time has been wasted depends on what you think you are doing when you propose an RFC.
There are a lot of questions that can be answered instantly, for example: Who is the best power ranger ? It's the pink one, obviously. Other questions may not be answered in your lifetime, such as Can we eradicate cancer ?
The question you ask when you propose an RFC is somewhere in between, it's going to take at least a month to answer, and is more complicated than choosing the best power ranger.
The question is this:
Do we want to include this feature, as proposed, at this time ?
If you consider this the question, and consider the RFC process the means by which to answer the question, whatever the answer to the question is, you haven't actually wasted any time - You set out to answer a question and done so.
The Reality
Obviously, you are likely to be biased as the proposer of the feature, and would prefer a positive response. But, it's important to note that a negative result doesn't equate to "We never want this feature".
There may be things you can do to change your proposal so that it is more palatable for internals, and so more acceptable at a later time.
When you spend a month or more working on something, and thinking about it, you become invested in the idea, and I recognize that. But, you are one person (or a small group of people) acting on behalf of millions. When things don't go the way you would prefer, you have to accept that you are simply wrong.
There's nothing wrong with being wrong, it just means there's more to learn, more work to do, or more to understand. Since learning, working, and understanding are things that, as programmers, we enjoy, it may even be better to be wrong than right, in a sense.
It may not be obvious, but even if your feature doesn't get in, you have pushed PHP forward a little bit: By dispersing your ideas you may inspire others, you may have come up with the answer to a question that hasn't been asked yet, and you've answered the question you set out to answer.
The code you wrote may end up in the bin, that is an unavoidable fact.
However, that doesn't at all mean that you've wasted your time.
That's all I have to say about that right now.
Peace out phomies :)
