he PHP Programming Innovation Award Winner of 2012 was announced. An interview with the winner, Karl Holz from Canada, was one of the main topics of the episode 33 of the Lately in PHP podcast conducted by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert. They also discussed the usual batch of PHP topics of interest like Zend Optimizer+ source code that was released, the PHP 5.5 feature freeze and roadmap, as well an article that compares PHP to an Hobbit, as well other languages to Lord Of The Rings story characters.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the recording. You can also subscribe to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.

Sometime ago a user of the Quora site asked a question if there was a language war, which languages you support and why. Another user gave a very creative response comparing programming languages with characters of the Lord of the Rings story of JRR Tolkien.

There's six reasons listed in the post:

• PHP is Scripted C
• PHP is not Teaming with C++ Evil
• PHP is Not particularly Beautiful but it is Very Useful
• PHP is Not the Fastest Language to Execute but is Agile
• JavaScript could be a Hobbit too but Asynchronous Programming is a Hell
• PHP Success Causes the Envy of Others

If you're interested to see the thread where the idea for this post came from, you can read it here on Quora.