On the Laravel News site, they have a post sharing a video from a presentation by Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP) looking forward at PHP in 2018.

PHP in 2018 is a talk by PHP creator Rasmus Lerdorf, which focuses on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3. We have some exciting low-level performance wins coming to PHP 7.3, which should be out late 2018. It’s highly encouraging that PHP’s focus is mainly on performance in the PHP 7.x releases.

For many in the PHP community, 2016 and 2017 was all about getting onto PHP 7. The drastic performance improvements and overall efficiency have resulted in PHP 7 adoption rates well beyond past PHP versions. If you are not on PHP 7 yet, you will learn why you should be, but the talk will focus more on new features in PHP 7.2 and 7.3 along with optimization and static analysis.

In the post, they give a brief summary of the talk and one of their favorite parts ("crappy code runs really really well"). The video of the talk is embedded in the page but you can also watch it on YouTube directly. The slides are here.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the language we all know and love (or love to hate) - PHP. Rasmus Lerdorf started the language to "scratch an itch" he needed to make a more dynamic web site. It's grown over the last twenty years into one of the most popular web programming languages. Several members of the PHP community have posted some of their own thoughts about the event:

• Joe Watkins
• Cal Evans
• Chris Hartjes
• Stephan Hochdorfer
• Pascal Martin
• Ben Ramsey
• Davey Shafik
• Anderson Casimiro
• Mark Railton
• AWS PHP SDK Blog
• Amanda Folson
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Anderson Casimiro
• Chris Tankersley
• Shameer C
• Tudor Barbu
• Erika Heidi
• Matthew Weier O'Phinney
• David Carr
• Rafael Dohms
• Derick Rethans
• Wim Godden
• Christian Wenz
• Oscar Merida
• Patrick Stephan
• Rob Allen
• Matthew Setter
• Matt Raines
• Justin Carmony
• Sherif Ramadan
• thePHP.cc
• Laravel News
• Ilia Alshanetsky
• Jordi Boggiano

Also, be sure to check out Ben Ramsey's article on Infoworld too! Have you shared your own thoughts about today? Let us know and we'll add it to the list! Also be sure yo check out everyone that tagged their tweets too!

Rob Allen has posted a guide to building and testing PHP 7, the next upcoming major build of the PHP language (released sometime later this year).

The GoPHP7-ext project aims to ensure that all the known PHP extensions out there work with the upcoming PHP 7. This is non-trivial as some significant changes have occurred in the core PHP engine (related to performance) that mean that extensions need to be updated. In order to help out (and prepare my own PHP code for PHP 7!), I needed the latest version of PHP7 working in a vagrant VM. Fortunately Rasmus has created a such a VM called php7dev, so let's start there.

He walks you through the process of grabbing the latest version of the virtual machine and set it up as a Vagrant VM instance. He talks about the different PHP versions contained in the VM and how to update PHP 7 to the latest pre-release version. Finally he talks about building an extension on the VM (he uses the apfd extension) and how to configure the VM to be able to test your own code too.

The WePay.com blog has a brief post sharing some answers from Rasmus Lerdorf himself about the future of PHP, specifically "PHP 5.6, 6.0 and beyond".

Rasmus Lerdorf likes to joke that he’s the most famous programmer from Greenland that we’re likely to meet this month. Truth is, the creator of PHP is one of the great legends of open source. The software he created is one of the most widely used technologies for server-side web programming. We were fortunate to catch up with Rasmus at the WePay office, listen to his talk on the present and future of PHP.

They link to the slides of his presentation and the answers to several of the questions from the audience including topics like:

• the direction of PHP, in particular PHP 6
• if you did have a feature wish list, what would you wish for
• What about backward compatibility?
• What’s your take on the static code analysis

On the PHPClasses.org site today there's a new blog post with four reasons "why all PHP frameworks suck" based on some recent comments from PHP's creator Rasmus Lerdorf.

Rasmus Lerdorf, the PHP creator, was invited to give a talk in PHP Frameworks Day conference. He talked mostly about the latest PHP developments, but for me the most interesting part was the question and answers section. Among other things, somebody asked Rasmus about his opinion on the PHP frameworks. That was as straight question about his opinion, so Rasmus gave a straight answer (near 31m 47s): "They (PHP frameworks) All suck!"

Some follow up was given to his comment with the four main points:

• Frameworks Execute The Same Code Repeatedly Without Need
• Frameworks Require Too Many Interdependent Classes
• [They provide] Needlessly Complicated Solutions
• Duplicating the Web Server Functionality

A summary is provided for each of these comments and some of the other questions Rasmus answered are also in the post including the dropping of APC over Zend Opcode, compiling PHP to binary and unicode. The post also includes the embedded video of Rasmus' full talk.

On the Inviqa techPortal today there's a new post talking about the most recent speaker at the PHP LondonRasmus Lerdorf.

July's PHP London had a particularly notable speaker – Rasmus Lerdorf himself presenting what's new in PHP. So many people wanted to attend that, with limited venue capacity, a live (and recorded) video stream was used for the first time. You can skip straight to seeing the slides and video of the session if you like, or keep reading for my impressions of the evening.

They include a brief overview of what Rasmus talked about including: a brief history and evolution of the language, a few points about PHP 5.4 and then on to the "shiny and new" of PHP 5.5. and the features it introduced. He also added in a bit at the end about two tools that his employer, Etsy, has released to help with more atomic deployments.

The Sunshine PHP Conference has announced their opening keynote speaker for this year's conference (in Miami, Florida February 8th and 9th) - Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of the PHP language.

SunshinePHP Developer Conference is proud to announce the opening keynote speaker Rasmus Lerdorf. In February 2013 when it is cold in most places around the world, it is still sunny and beautiful in Florida. So come down to Miami for a few days and enjoy sun, community, and learn all in one great conference.

Tickets for the event are already on sale with an Early Bird price (pre-November 30th) of $159.95 USD. If you're more inclined towards speaking at the event, their Call for Papers is only open until December 1st so hurry and get those submission in!

Engine Yard has released the audio from a recent (webcast) panel discussion they did about the Future of PHP with members of the PHP community (a part of their "Cloud Out Loud" podcast series).

Elizabeth Naramore talks with David Soria Parra, Rasmus Lerdorf, and Stas Malyshev for a panel discussion about Internals. Our panel of experts will share their thoughts and predictions about the existing PHP landscape, and what is to come.

It's about 30 minutes long and they talk about PHP 5.4, compiling PHP, performance issues, the slow rate of adoption in newer releases, memory usage and some of the general strengths and weaknesses of the language. Elizabeth also asks each person on the panel about things they've each seen done wrong on the project and something they'd like to see in its future.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.

The South Florida PHP User Group has announced their December 2011 meeting - happening on the 14th at 7pm - with a look at how far PHP has come in 2011 and some of the things coming up. Rasmus Lerdorf will be presenting.

For our "FREE" (yes, all of our meetups are free) December meetup we have a special guest, Rasmus Lerdorf, visiting to talk about "PHP in 2011". Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP, will talk to us and give his perspective on the prospects of his brainchild. "PHP in 2011": A look at the state of PHP in 2011 and how it fits into the current technology stack followed by an overview of what you should and shouldn't be doing along with a summary of new and upcoming features in PHP 5.3 and PHP 5.4. This will be a 90 minute talk with an extensive Q&A session will follow.

To RSVP for the event (held at Nova Southeastern University), head to their Meetup page. There's already about 40 people signed up, so be sure and get your name in quickly to reserve your spot!

If you're a PHP user group leader (or member for that matter) and would like to have your group's upcoming meetups posted here, send us the information! We love to share!