Before going on with the points, let me state something: please avoid flame wars, all the Scala vs. PHP stuff, fanboyism and what not. This post is not about that. Regarding Wade Arnold I have to say that I fully respect him. While I don't know him personally, I know him for his work on AMFPHP, since it was a platform I used to work with before.

Alvaro talks about functional programming and some of the main points he had made about Erlang in a talk he had given - code reload, being ready for multi-core and no shared state between scripts. He talks about how these (really) apply to PHP.

The discussion on my blog post "Do not use regular expressions for parsing" ended in a discussion about BBcodes in general. I just used them as an example to demonstrate why it it is impossible to parse such a language with regular expressions - and mentioned in a subclause, that I don't see any sense in using them at all.

He looks at some of the myths surrounding them and their use (more secure, easier to use, safer than HTML) and gives some reasons for making teh choice of HTML over them.

I had the good fortune to be interviewed by an IEEE magazine in February to comment on the demise of Java (vs. PHP). A 45-minute interview turned into a paragraph in the article, but I thought that I might put all of my thoughts up on my blog.

There's some interesting ideas here, but I'm not sure that most of them mean the "victory" of Java over PHP. In fact, most of them seem to reinforce the thought that PHP and Java will coexist happily for a good long while.

Zend is going to be having a webcast on it's PHP5 certification on august 4th. Now as far as I know this is only their second webcast (first one was on web services), but I am sure (hoping) there will be more to come in the future.

So where am I going with this? If Zend is going to have webcasts and (hopefully) record them, they need a single repository for the recordings so fools like me can easily find them later. Currently there isn't even a Webcast tag on the zend developer blog so you have to do a bit of digging (though not much - thankfully - right now) in the blog to find it.

She suggests a only minor improvements to make things a bit easier on those trying to find the recordings (besides in the blog). After all, what good is the information unless you can find it...

Bruce Tate recently wrote a book "Beyond Java" that is critical of Java and praises Ruby excessively. The book has very few positive things to say about PHP.

Well, my personal preference in terms of language is a simple clean C-like syntax. I want something that I can teach programmers in 2 days. I don't want an unfamiliar syntax that requires relearning a lot. I don't want programmers to agonize for hours on the right way to code something new. That's why I don't particularly like Ruby's syntax (though i admit i am a novice at Ruby). In contrast, PHP is basically C (or C++ or Java) with $ signs in front of variables - it's that easy.

He continues on to give code examples of both PHP and Ruby that do roughly the same thing - basicslly the same, but for someone who's been programming for a while, the PHP one might seem more familiar at first glance. He also points out some comments made that Ruby is a bit over-hyped...]]> Mon, 19 Dec 2005 06:58:59 -0600