The PHP Town Hall podcast has posted a new episode - Episode #7: "Web Sockets Are Fast".

Chris Boden joins us to talk about a Ratchet and React. The conversation is basically Ben and Phil asking a bunch of questions about how Ratchet works, pretending we know what is going on while Chris uses lots of words like "concurrency" and "non-blocking". We decide that PHP is web-scale, event-driven programming is not just for NodeJS hipsters, we all take the "Are You a Brogrammer" test and Michael Wales crashes the show half way through like a ninja.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the episode directly. You can also subscribe to their feed if you'd like the latest shows as they're released.

Phil Sturgeon has reposted an answer he gave in response to this Quroa entry about why people "think PHP sucks".

There are a lot of reasons people "hate" PHP, or at least look down on it. Some of them are founded, some are not, and some of them are circumstantial.

He mentions seven of the reasons people commonly give for not liking PHP:

• "Inconsistent haystack / needle"
• PHP is a HTML file, with logic
• No standards
• Lack of Quality Packages
• Misconception (about the current PHP features)
• You were doing it wrong
• Elitism ("not using PHP is cool")

There's even more discussion happening on the subject in this reddit post with thoughts from both PHP and non-PHP developers.

The latest episode of the CodeIgniter Podcast was released yesterday and a guest on the show was Derick Allard, a former EllisLab-er. On Derick's blog there's a new post with his take on being a guest.

Yesterday I had a chance to sit down and do Episode#4 of the CodeIgniter Podcast with Phil Sturgeon and Kenny Meyers. It was a blast! [...] In my opinion, the best part of any free-flow discussion like a podcast is that you get the (reasonably) unfiltered thoughts of people who are just plain excited by what they do.

You can find this latest episode here.