Christian M. Mackeprang has a recent post to his site sharing a few possibly forgotten code constructs whose use has faded in recent years. He revisits them, complete with code examples, and why he thinks they should be resurrected.

Some things in the programming world are so easy to misuse that most people prefer to never use them at all. These are the programming equivalent of a flamethrower: You might rarely be in the position to really need one, but every once in a while it turns out that you need to take down a forest. In that case, there’s no easier way than going Rambo on your codebase.

[...] That’s where a few of the old, forgotten code constructs come into play. Creative use of features such as goto, multiple inheritance, eval, and recursion may be just the right solution for experienced developers when used in the right situation.

The four constructs he recommends are: goto, multiple inheritance, eval and recursion. For each item in the list he provides a basic look at the concept and follows it up with "the right way" of doing things to prevent common issues with the feature.

On the SitePoint PHP blog Larry Garfield, a member of the PHP-FIG group, has written up an article covering the past, present and future of the PHP-FIG. In it he tries to give readers a perspective on where the group came from, some of the growth they've seen along the way and, finally, the proposal for PHP-FIG 3.0 - a restructuring of the organization based on things they've learned so far.

The PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG, or just FIG for short) is at a crossroads. Many electrons have been sacrificed talking about FIG’s tribulations of late, but sadly much of it has been FUD, with little effort spent on the positive. At SitePoint’s invitation, I’d like to offer a more positive outlook on FIG and the PHP community, and demonstrate why FIG can, and should, continue to have a positive impact on the PHP ecosystem.

He starts with where the group began (an "uncomfortable beginning") at php[tek] 2015 and the proposal/passing of the PSR-0 autoloading specification soon after. He then gets into the "slow but steady growth" the group had over the next several years and some of the groups that became involved (not just framework projects either). He covers some of the other PSRs created/passed, the impact they've made on the community and the growing pains they've gone through. He ends the post talking about the PHP-FIG 3.0 proposal and some of the support, opposition and discussion that has come along with that.

The PHP Rountable podcast, hosted by Sammy Kaye Powers has published their latest episode - Episode #41: The PHP-FIG: Past, Present & Future.

The PHP-FIG has really helped the PHP community get onboard the collaboration train with really great standards like the PSR-4 autoloading standard and the PSR-7 HTTP message interfaces.

We discuss PSR-0 through PSR-13 and the process they go through to become standards. We also discuss where the FIG came from and the possible big changes coming to the organization soon.

This episode features a large group of guests, all related to the PHP-FIG in some way:

• Cal Evans
• Paul Jones
• Paul Dragoonis
• Chris Tankersly
• Evert Pot
• Samantha Quiñones
• Michael Cullum
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney

You can watch this episode either through the in-page video player or directly over on Youtube. Be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when the latest episodes are being recorded and are released.

The Sound of Symfony podcast is back today with their latest episodes and some special changes - Episode #9: The past and future of Symfony.

Sound of Symfony is back from its unplanned hiatus and launching a new format. We're also switching things up, and add two new co-hosts, Ryan Weaver and Jared Farrish.

This episode's topic is "How has Symfony kept up".

Topics mentioned in this episode include the NelmioApiDocBundle, the HATEOAS library from William Durand and a pull request for dynamic environment variables to Symfony. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 of the episode directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for the latest updates as new episodes are released.

On the Symfony Finland blog they've posted a look at Symfony's past, present and future in terms of its structure and goals of stability and flexibility. This also includes some of the origins of PHP itself and how it evolved to the stage where creating framework made sense.

I like to think of modern PHP frameworks as glue to put together components to form something that is more than the sum of it's parts. [...] The Symfony Framework is a standard way (and framework code) to create applications using components. The application is always built with a specific structure, which allows code reuse of complete functionalities (Bundles in Symfony lingo) across projects. If you build using a collection of components, you'll need to invest time in learning how that software has decided to use the available components.

He talks more about the idea of components and how they make up a greater whole (like Symfony) and how they relate to the idea of "bundles". He then looks forward to the future of the framework, its long-term support and its work towards being fully PHP7 compatible.

The combination of the PHP language at 20 years and the Symfony framework at 10 years offers a stable platform with flexibility to adapt and grow in the future.

In a recent post to his blog Kenny Katzgrau talks about why PHP was a ghetto (both on the quality front and the public perception) but how things have turned around and the language is being perceived as stronger all the time.

I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn’t heard it before. [...] He didn’t say the actual language was poor — he said it was the general culture surrounding the language, which is usually iconified by a language’s founder, that seems to encourage bad practices. That is, PHP code bases tend to be hacky and unmaintainable.

He goes through a few things in PHP's past including the influence that Rasmus Lerdorf has had from the beginning and how the "pizza-faced adolescent years" of PHP have been a big part of the problem. Because of its past, PHP had been considered a "ghetto" but with recent improvements like encouragement of coding standards, full-stack frameworks, great unit testing tools and the same low barrier for entry, the language is gathering its strength and moving away from its past into something new.

As Danne Lundqvist mentions in a new post, there's a new post on the Gartner.com site about the past, present and future of the PHP language.

From the Gartner post:

I just published a research note on PHP. Clients can find it here. The research note goes into *much* more detail but the overview is [in the rest of the post]. Keep in mind that this content is targeted at mainstream IT organizations. PHP has been a cornerstone technology on the Web for more than a decade. While its adoption among mainstream IT organizations has been limited in the past, many corporate application development (AD) projects are discovering the unique benefits of PHP.

Danne highlights two quotes that were of particular interest in the report - one from the quote above about PHP being a cornerstone of many corporate web application development and the other talking about PHP's role not just in backend application development but also it being useful in front-end toolsets too.

Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:

• Community News: PHP London 2008 Comes to a Close

• Community News: PHP-GTK 2 Released
• C7Y: ProPHP Podcast - Newscast 03.06.2008
• Matthew Weir O'Phinney's Blog: Zend_Form Webinar Wednesday
• Developer Tutorials: Easy PDF Generation in PHP
• Community News: Latest PEAR Releases for 03.03.2008
• Chris Hartjes' Blog: Custom CakePHP 1.2 Pagination Queries
• Zend Developer Zone: Windows Server 2008 Now 'PHP Ready'
• Michael Kimsal's Blog: Another PHP bugbear...
• Site News: Popular Posts for the Week of 03.07.2008
• PHPBuilder.com: The Ternary Conditional Operator
• PHPWomen.org: BarCampMelbourne2008 Rundown
• Derick Rethans' Blog: British date format parsing
• Christian Wenz's Blog: Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 Released (and Zend Studio 5.5.1, too)
• Chris Hartjes' Blog: "My framework is more MVC than *your* framework!"

Christian Wenz has pointed out an older post from Larry Wall talking about the line between scripting and programming languages (mentioning specifically PHP).

From the article "":

I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. [...] If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.

Christian Wenz has pointed out an older post from Larry Wall talking about the line between scripting and programming languages (mentioning specifically PHP).

From the article "":

I think, to most people, scripting is a lot like obscenity. I can't define it, but I'll know it when I see it. [...] If I had to pick one metaphor, it'd be easy onramps. And a slow lane. Maybe even with some optional fast lanes.