In this new post to his blog Hartmut Holzgraefe looks at a new effort that wants to be "the next PHP" while still being PHP. Confused? Take a look at PHPReboot.

PHP.reboot is a reboot of PHP, each Hollywood movie has its own reboot, why not doing the same for one of the most popular programming language. The aim is to keep the philosophy of PHP but adapt it to be more in sync with the Web of 2010.

Hartmut's post is a "braindump" of some of his thoughts about the project including responses to some of its main claims:

• less $, less ';' like in javascript
• secure by default: no eval, no magic quotes/string interpolation
• full unicode support
• a SQL compatible syntax
• URI/file literal

In his opinion, the language doesn't look much like PHP anymore and would not only be incompatible with current PHP but also wouldn't benefit from the C libraries PHP has access to.

...so why should it have the letters PHP in its name at all?