On Reddit.com there's a heated discussion going on in response to this bug filed asking about aliasing PHP function names to make them more consistent (specifically "htmlentities_decode" versus "html_entity_decode").

[...] Current naming conventions are really horrible. For instance, look at differences between str_replace, strlen, parse_str, htmlspecialchars. All work with same type but their names are completely different. So, string functions should go to String namespace (Stringreplace()), array functions to Array namespace (Arraysearch()) and so on.

Back in the Reddit post most of the commentors agree that this kind of thing would be beneficial to the language, but - as several point out - this could have serious backwards compatibility issues. What do you think? Voice your opinion!

On the SitePoint PHP blog today, Kevin Yank shares his thoughts in the form of a list for what makes for "good" and "bad" PHP code.

When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so much about the kind of programmer they are. Here's the question: "In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?"

Among the items on the list for the good side are things like: structure, consistency, security, and portability. He gives a bit of example code that shows the three levels of "goodness" in a script (using $_GET variables).