Davey Shafik has an interesting post to his site sharing some of his views on the "syntax" of different programming communities - PHP, Ruby, Python and Perl.

In my (almost) three years of being in a developer relations type role I have attended events in several communities and have observed how they differ from my primary community (PHP). As I’ve tried to understand those differences and the reasons behind them, I have had many discussions with members of many more communities also.

After attending my first PyCon (US) I was struck by just how welcoming and diverse the community is and had many conversations trying to understand why this is. This is not what this post is about. This post is about conferences specifically, and how communities place different priorities on different things when it comes to how they run, organize, speak at, and attend events.

He talks about conferences - both attending and speaking at them - and how the situation differs from community to community. He did some background research on why things are they way they are and how that has influenced the overall focus of the community.

On the Yahoo Developer Network a new post talks about some of the developer "advent" calendars that have popped up around the web - including the PHP Advent.

Christmas is upon us. Developers are embracing the spirit of sharing their knowledge and wisdom, while taking the opportunity to look back and recollect what 2010 brought us in terms of new technologies and ideas. A number of "advent" calendars started posting their blog-a-day-till-Dec-24th. Here are some for your reading pleasure while you kick back with a glass of wine by the fireplace.

Also on the list are: the 24 Ways (general web dev), the Perl Advent, Web Performance Calendar and the HTML5 Advent. Be sure to check out the comments for more calendars!

In a new post to his blog today Conor Mac Aoidh talks about a way he's developed to get audio alerts whenever PHP errors pop up in your scripts using the swatch tool.

Kae posted today about tackling this problem under Linux, but I’ve found that it’s quite a different task under OS X.

It also uses some additional Perl modules (like Date::Calc and Date::Manip) to set up swatch. From there it's just a matter of adding a few lines to a configuration file to watch for the errors and sound the "bell". A few bash scripts will need to be added to correctly start the service too.

Patrick Allaert has put together a shell command that can take your PHP4 code and replace its current constructors with PHP5-formatted ones.

It assumes your classes are always declared with the class keyword starting at the beginning of the line and that your files have the .php extension.

It uses a regular expression in a perl command to search through the current directory and look for the ".php" files to replace the "function ClassName" sort of thing with a "function __construct".

As a way of answering the common language comparison question (PHP vs Java/Perl), Stefan Mischook has posted these thoughts comparing the languages himself.

[For web development] PHP is the way to go. Perl is a good language but it was not designed initially for web development - that functionality was added later.

He talks about his experience using Perl in web-based environments and some of the issues he's seen around using it or Java for web applications...including a suggestion for Java's place in the world:

Java is great for the enterprise...that means, if you plan to be working for very large companies. But it takes a lot longer to create anything in Java vs PHP.

The Enterprise PHP Magazine has pointed out some facts (slightly skewed, it seems) about the availability of a few different types of programmers, PHP included, according to several search engines.

I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

The results show about 780,000 PHP-related resumes on Google, 541,000 on Yahoo and the (obviously incorrect) 59,700,000 from Bing.com. There are a lot of PHP developers out there, but I can't imagine quite that many. Either way, even the numbers from the other search engines come in over the counts of the other three languages.

Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

Recently CIO Magazine had a roundtable interview with representatives from each of the major language players on the web today - Javascript, Ruby, Perl, Python, Tcl and, of course, PHP.

Three years ago, Lynn Greiner interviewed the big cheeses responsible for the popular scripting languages PHP, Perl, Tcl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript to find out where the languages were headed. In this follow-up discussion, she asks the dynamic language luminaries what has changed since then.

Representatives from (previously) Netscape, the Perl Foundation, the Python Software Foundation and the IronRuby team were all included. Topics asked about include the differing needs for different languages, trends on adoption and why some of these shifts are happening.

Eirik Hoem has pointed out an online tool a coworker shared with him to work with regular expressions for multiple languages.

A coworker of mine has been working on a ajax enabled regex tool which lets you evaluate regex expressions in several languages (including PHP PCRE and PHP POSIX) with instant results.

The tool lets you put in the string you want to match again and the pattern you want to match with. The results are automatically populated below it, making it easy to fine-tune your expression to only what you want.

Arnold Daniels points out a quick method for creating what he calls "perl-like temporary variables" in the global scope of a script:

When writing code in the global scope, I often have a problem where I'm overwriting a variable. This happens even more often when I work on code of somebody else. Usually has the variable which does the overwriting is usually just a temporary variable.

His code is a simple few lines that shows how it could be used when trying to write information out to a file handle. Some of the comments on the post criticize his use of the global scope but Arnold comes back with his reasoning - mostly that there is already code in the global scope and that adding something else is only adding to it, not making things worse.