My question is this: how did PHP get so many libraries, get installed on so many computers, and attract so much developer attention in the first place? [...] To summarize: Lisp is marketing itself poorly. Lisp either needs to get competitive on the ease of use and productivity front, or lose programmers to other languages.

He mentions this post from Brian Carper and this response as two places bringing up good points about Lisp and its community.

That's one of the things that PHP has going for it over Lisp - the community. PHP's community is constantly pushing, reaching out to the developers with simple tutorials and (usually) useful libraries. He makes a call to the Lisp developers out there, though:

The day will come when Lisp won't be cast aside as a quaint relic of bygone days. On that day, Lisp will be seen as equal to the big languages. And it will learn from and share with them as peers.

As I switched my main system recently from Linux to OpenSolaris I compiled PHP. Quiet obvious things are a little bit different on Solaris. The usual ./buildconf && ./configure && make install doesn't work anymore. The good news: It's not much harder.

A few extra packages are required (like SUNWgmake, SUNWgcc and SUNWbison) and the Re2c library, but after that, it's just like a normal install. All commands needed to make the build are included in the post.

I have taken the time to abstract the AIM API into my own class that not only simplifies the code we will need to work with that API but also makes it modular and easy to port from application to application. To begin you will need to download the AuthnetAIM class. You can find it here.

He walks you through the setup and configuration of the library and includes a few examples of how to make both simple and more complex transactions through it.

For site like Flickr, Wikipedia, and Facebook - all of whom deal with enormous availability problems - to have stuck with PHP, well, that means something profound. While previously I respected PHP programmers, I always felt that they must not understand much about actual computer science. They were stuck in a procedural world, and a glimpse of what "more advanced" languages could show them would "enlighten" them.

He suggests that PHP scripts, especially the "large libraries" some developers create do some very routine tasks that could be accomplished much simpler. He points out, though, that PHP does have something going for it and that, despite a difference in functionality offered, Lisp could learn something from PHP.

I admit that these judgments are hard to make. I could be wrong, more or less. Type hints are probably useful when code becomes stable enough and at the boundaries between modules. But I still tend to avoid using them until I get an actual bug that might have been prevented by a type hint. Their usefulness is and has to be an empirical question. The purpose of using them has to be catching errors earlier, so if they don't have that effect, there's no point.

He lists three reasons why he had given up on type hinting before, one being the limited usefulness when it came to objects. Applying it to scalars is a different matter, though, and can prevent improper passing of array/scalars when the other is needed.

After reading this thread, I thought I'd spend some time writing about what I feel are some measures you can take to landing a job in PHP. This first part is going to concentrate on the kind of technical matters I think any PHP developer should at least have knowledge of, if not some kind of experience.

He suggests: as much programming experience as possible, experience with the full development lifecycle, knowing how to work with external libraries and frameworks, being able to adapt to development tools, knowing web application security, and some work with web services and a touch of system administration. He's not saying that you have to have all of these - just that the more you know, the better off you could be.

Learn the process of writing Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) applications using native JavaScript code and PHP. This article introduces a few different frameworks and application program interfaces (APIs) that reduce the amount of code you need to write to achieve a complete Ajax-based Web application.

They (briefly) explain what Ajax is and the benefits of it before jumping right in to a sample page. They go for the "manual first" approach so developers know to make basic connections with the XMLHttpRequest object and handle the responses. They do mention some of the libraries offered that help with the connections too (like jQuery, Prototype and Dojo).

What I miss in the feedback I got from my previous post was people acually using VCL/PHP for enterprise applications and how that is working. From what I can tell the usage of Exceptions is still limited to the 3rd party libs such as Zend Framework which are included with VCL/PHP. That's a bit interesting.

He mentions one big issue that several people pointed out with the VLC implementation - the class name prefixing (or lack there of) and the problems it could cause in the future. Prado uses naming conventions that keep its classes out of the move generally named realm. He also touches on the quality of the code behind the VLC implementation, noting that while it might work well for smaller projects, there's more of a potential for failure on enterprise-level usage.

Let's kickstart this blogpost by defining what an iterator actually is. According to wikipedia, an iterator is. A collection can pretty much be anything. The most obvious sources would be arrays, but other than that, iterations can be done over database resultsets, strings, datetime intervals, directories, file content and XML listings, to name a few.

He looks at the iterator interface that comes bundled in the SPL and how you can create a custom one to loop through your own data collection. He includes an example - a colorful string iterator that "pretties up" an HTML string with various colors.

We all know that loose coupling is good and tight coupling is bad, so why, over the past couple of years, has the web industry gone nuts for tightly-coupled frameworks?

He talks about the evolution of the framework, how Ruby on Rails really popularized it and some of his experience with a few of the PHP ones (CakePHP, Zend Framework, CodeIgniter and Symfony). Of those he experienced, he felt that that strongest player of the group was the Zend Framework. It allowed for the framework feel and functionality but provided enough separation to be able to drop in libraries and configure custom settings easily.