A little while back Matthew Turland posted about something that some developers moving over to PHP from more strict languages have an issue with - variable typing - and how its evolved in languages over time.

Without a little background in programming languages or computer science in general, it's entirely possible that typing systems are not something that have crossed your mind. I thought I'd take a blog entry to share some of my thoughts on how it's affecting the creation and evolution of languages.

He walks through history a bit, mentioning C, Java, Python and PHP and how they differ in their default type handling. He especially focuses on the "blurred line" between strong and weak typing and how some if offers special features to the language that uses the method.

In a new post on his blog, Wez Furlong shares some of the materials from a presentation he gave at the PHP Con West back in 2003 on the topic of "Extending PHP".

While poking around the disks in my linux box, I found my materials for a session on extending PHP that I originally gave as a 3 hour tutorial at PHP{Con West 2003.

Sadly, I seem to have lost the working C code (libares bindings for PHP), but all the relevant parts can be found in the comprehensive PDF I made from the slides: Extending PHP Slides (PDF). The content is based on PHP 4, but should still be applicable to PHP 5.

The talk [PDF] covers the creation of a sample DNS resolving library to extend the functionality already in PHP, and includes some of the code examples (in PHP) to show how it all works. This is followed by the C code to build the extension, defining each of the functions, and geting it up and running.

In this latest post from the Professional PHP Blog, there's a brief compaison of PHP versus other languages on a few different points.

Chris Shiflett posted some thoughts on PHP and Ruby on Rails which has generated some interesting discussion. Chris divides programming languages into two categories: Flexible and powerful, Structured and organized.

I prefer to group languages in a different way.

Among the topics to compare the languages under, included are things like garbage collection, interactive or batch, and abstraction. For each, he breaks the category down, describing what it's all about and seperates it into its two components, assigning langauges.

On his blog today, Andi Gutmans has posted his feelings on the growing trend of PHP developers turnng to the C level of things to add new functionality to the PHP development.

One thing I have noticed, is that quite often, PHP developers who are seeking for new PHP features are prematurely trying to implement them in C. Although, there are definitely cases where you want to write your code in C, I think in some cases PHP is too quickly dismissed.

Developing features in PHP not only takes less time, but is also less prone to bugs, easier to maintain, and more stable and secure. Also, in the majority of cases, whether such a feature were implemented in C or PHP, would not make a significant different to overall application performance.

He gives the example of the ZSearch functionality that they mentioned in the php|architect webcast for the Zend framework - entirely implemented in PHP, not C. He also mentions a point that web developers would do good to take to heart - the bottlenecks usually aren't in the code - it's dealing with external resources that's the problem...