From PHPEverywhere today, there's a new post from John Lim that asks the question, "Is PHP4 the new Perl?"

Tim Bray, one of authors of XML, voices concern about PHP: "So here's my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

But in the big picture, it feels vulnerable to me."

John argues that it's not the language's fault if the code that's written is bad (more coders need this). He also suggests that maybe PHP4 is perl for the web - simply because of the one of the reasons it's popular - it's potential for abuse from badly written code.