While reminiscing what PHP was like back in the early early years, I stumbled upon a little historical nugget from the old website. Do you know what the acronym PHP stands for? Many of us do, or think we do. [...] But how was the definition chosen? For fun, here's a look back at the official vote that determined this new meaning way back in 1998. It might be worth mentioning that Rasmus, the father of PHP, did not vote for the eventual winner.

He also includes a few "notable quotes that could be taken out of context" from Rasmus Lerdorf concerning his opinions on the matter of the acronym's meaning as well as some other brief notes on the history of PHP and its name change.

I'd like to dispell the myth that errors are a bad thing. Errors are not a bad thing. Errors are a good thing! They tell you exactly what to fix, and exactly where to fix it. The only mystery is in actually interpretting the language of the error, which is another skill that beginning coders have yet to master. What does the PHP interpreter really mean when it says "unexpected T_VARIABLE"? What's a T_VARIABLE, anyway?

This document is the first in a series that will attempt to help you decode error messages. This version is aimed at very new programmers, working in PHP.

The remainder of the post looks at four of the common errors that might pop up - "unexpected T_VARIABLE", "Maximum execution time exceeded", "Undefined index", and "Syntax error". Under each, she talks about what they mean and how to catch what they're referring to. There's also an example for each to show what the error-causing code might look like.]]> Fri, 03 Feb 2006 06:52:16 -0600