On the Exakat blog they have a new post with the results from their evaluation of a wide range of PHP applications showing the Top 100 PHP functions in use.

Here is the top 100 PHP functions : it is the list of the most often used PHP native functions.

The functions are named, and ranked from 1 to 100. The other 4500 functions are not ranked now. The frequency column represents how often this function is used across PHP code : the reference corpus is a list of 1900 PHP open source projects. They were audited with Exakat static analysis engine, version 1.2.5. The average is the number of time a function is called within one project. Some function are used in isolation, and others are a staple.

The top 5 on the list are:

• count
• is_array
• substr
• in_array
• explode

Each item on the list comes with "frequency" and "average" scores (that mostly relate directly). Check out the post for the full list and a list of some insights they worked up as they generated the listing.

In a lighthearted post for this April Fool's Cal Evans has released some interesting research ("research" here is "searching on GitHub") for the statistics behind the use of profanity in code. (As you'd expect, there's profanity in the post, so don't read if you're offended by that).

The late great George Carlin had many awesome comedy skits. One of them – possibly his most famous – is “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” from the comedy album “Class Clown”. In it he gives his list of seven words that – at the time – were inappropriate for over the air broadcast in the United States.

I thought it would be fun – if for no other reason than clickbait – to run the 7 dirty words against Github to see who is using what, and where. I took screenshots so that you can see each word and which languages use it the most. I also list PHP’s rating for each word out of the top 10 languages.

While I won't go into the list of actual words in this post, it's interesting to see which languages come out on top for certain words. In most cases PHP came in somewhere in the middle with a few exceptions either way.

Andreas Gohr has posted some info and code about one of the social networking/linking services out there, StumbleUpon. His post includes PHP code to figure out what your site's StumbleUpon ranking is.

StumbleUpon recently(?) added a "search result enhancement" feature to their toolbar. It adds StumbleUpon "star ratings" to Google results (See screenshot). This got me interested and I had a closer look at their extension...

As part of this "closer look" he came up with the code to return a general ranking for the URL you would give it. It does require a StumbleUpon auth key and username, but if you use the service already, you're one step ahead on that.

Andreas Gohr has posted some info and code about one of the social networking/linking services out there, StumbleUpon. His post includes PHP code to figure out what your site's StumbleUpon ranking is.

StumbleUpon recently(?) added a "search result enhancement" feature to their toolbar. It adds StumbleUpon "star ratings" to Google results (See screenshot). This got me interested and I had a closer look at their extension...

As part of this "closer look" he came up with the code to return a general ranking for the URL you would give it. It does require a StumbleUpon auth key and username, but if you use the service already, you're one step ahead on that.

Pádraic Brady, developer of the (work in progress) PHP-based strategy game Astrum Futura has posted today with the results of his look at a ranking of current PHP-based games and their popularity.

Sometimes I find it useful when measuring what's being downloaded in terms of open source PHP games to look at the top 10 rankings on Sourceforge for each gaming category. I say sometimes, because it tends to be fairly unreliable and doesn't really reflect real usage online.

Games on his list include Solar Imperium, Alien Assault Traders, PHP RISK and number one on the list - phpDiplomacy. Each item on the list includes the Sourceforge ranking against all other projects.

Pádraic Brady, developer of the (work in progress) PHP-based strategy game Astrum Futura has posted today with the results of his look at a ranking of current PHP-based games and their popularity.

Sometimes I find it useful when measuring what's being downloaded in terms of open source PHP games to look at the top 10 rankings on Sourceforge for each gaming category. I say sometimes, because it tends to be fairly unreliable and doesn't really reflect real usage online.

Games on his list include Solar Imperium, Alien Assault Traders, PHP RISK and number one on the list - phpDiplomacy. Each item on the list includes the Sourceforge ranking against all other projects.

According to the latest stats from the TIOBE Programming Community Index, PHP has dropped down a spot from its previous standing last month down to the number five slot for November, being bumped down by (Visual) Basic.

As the long term trends graph shows, though, PHP and Basic are neck and neck, with one only gaining slightly over the other. As the International PHP Magazine site notes:

As the graph on TIOBE's web site indicates, PHP has been charting an uneven course, facing ups and just as many downs. However, PHP's position as of Feb 2006 is significantly higher than that of 2005.

You can get all of the stats and graphs for this latest month of results from the TIOBE site.

According to the latest stats from the TIOBE Programming Community Index, PHP has dropped down a spot from its previous standing last month down to the number five slot for November, being bumped down by (Visual) Basic.

As the long term trends graph shows, though, PHP and Basic are neck and neck, with one only gaining slightly over the other. As the International PHP Magazine site notes:

As the graph on TIOBE's web site indicates, PHP has been charting an uneven course, facing ups and just as many downs. However, PHP's position as of Feb 2006 is significantly higher than that of 2005.

You can get all of the stats and graphs for this latest month of results from the TIOBE site.

It's official - Javascript sucks. Well, at least according to Harry Fuecks and the group from the last WebTuesday meeting.

The surprise outcome of last nights webtuesday - Javascript sucks harder than PHP. I still can't quite believe it. Maarten took the PHP corner against me in the Javascript corner, both of us shamelessly advocating each language under various headings.

1 minute max per topic—no outright lies although often bordering on truthiness. Verdicts provided by the audience, based on who could shout loudest from a choice [ranking].

Of course, Harry does comment that the comparison is a bit unfair (server versus client side), but there are alternatives for both (client-side PHP and server-side Javascript) so make a foundation for enough of a comparison. At the end of the night, though, the results of the votes were conclusive - Javascript was in worse shape than PHP, though the winner was "he one that came out hurting less".

It's official - Javascript sucks. Well, at least according to Harry Fuecks and the group from the last WebTuesday meeting.

The surprise outcome of last nights webtuesday - Javascript sucks harder than PHP. I still can't quite believe it. Maarten took the PHP corner against me in the Javascript corner, both of us shamelessly advocating each language under various headings.

1 minute max per topic—no outright lies although often bordering on truthiness. Verdicts provided by the audience, based on who could shout loudest from a choice [ranking].

Of course, Harry does comment that the comparison is a bit unfair (server versus client side), but there are alternatives for both (client-side PHP and server-side Javascript) so make a foundation for enough of a comparison. At the end of the night, though, the results of the votes were conclusive - Javascript was in worse shape than PHP, though the winner was "he one that came out hurting less".