Focusing on PHP day in and day out is nice, but sometimes it's good to branch out a bit. Kevin Yank agrees and decided to give Python a try. He's written up this post to the SitePoint PHP blog as he explores the language from a PHP developer's perspective.

Like may SitePoint readers, I cut my teeth on PHP. I've become very comfortable with it over the years, warts and all. PHP continues to be a dependable choice, but PHP hasn’t changed a whole lot lately. [...] Python has a lot in common with PHP: it’s a dynamically typed, open source scripting language with excellent documentation and a thriving community around it.

He includes a few basic "Hello World" kinds of examples in Python just to introduce you to the language structure (indenting for code structure? that's crazy talk for us PHPers) and some of the handy features of the language like sequences and the language's automatic namespace support.

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.

In a recent post to his blog, Michael Kimsal asks a question that I'm sure PHP developers everywhere are wondering - why did Google choose to go with Python as the programming language of choice for their new App Engine service.

TechCrunch is announcing Google's new "App Engine" service being launched this evening. The basic service is a full app stack hosted and managed by Google, providing a web framework (maybe I'm misreading this?) and the Google 'big table' database service. [...] My question is "why was Python was chosen instead of PHP?"

There's been some great responses since it was originally posted including everything from agreement to rationalizations for the move (though there is a fair amount of PHP and Python bashing going on - an obvious occurance).

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.