In a recent post to his site Dominic Tancredi has posted some of his own opinions about the PHP language, a rebuttal to all of those who say that PHP is dying.

A junior programmer with a master's asked me, "Is PHP a dying language being taken over by trending technologies like Ruby on Rails?" Here are my thoughts. Order. It all comes down to order. Order is what defines us, clarifies ideas. Order allows us to get to market quicker, safer, and less defects. Order is a pristine engine that is maintainable, scalable and extendable.

He talks about the evolution of web development language over the years: how Ruby on Rails was the "next big thing" for a while and how PHP, despite starting from a small community grew into something a bit haphazard and crazy. Out of that craziness, though, came what he calls the "PHP Renaissance", a time when PHP is gaining order, standards are being defined and good practices are winning over the old ways. He mentions some adoption numbers and reinforces a suggestion from Phil Sturgeon that we all need to act more like a community and less like a tribe (or a set of tribes, centered around tools or techniques).

In response to a previous post benchmarking exceptions, Volker Dusch has posted some of his own thoughts and benchmarking results on the same topic.

Some days ago there was a blog post regarding php exception performance in 5.4 and the numbers got reported all over the place. The actually numbers are secondary. The main point is: Don’t trust "random" stuff on the Internet when thinking about improving your application performance. You always need to measure things for your self and take care doing so! I've initially trusted the benchmark myself and disgraced the whole post saying: "Well yes, exceptions are slower than if statements but nice that they got faster".

He includes some results with a bit more standardized testing - one run with both 5.3 and 5.4 using XDebug and another with it turned off for both. His results make sense, if you think about them:

So what we learn from that? Running stuff with debugging tools is slower than not doing that. That's why we don’t use xDebug in production.

In a new post to his blog today Phil Sturgeon responds to some comments made in another post about PHP not "being an acceptable COBOL".

Anyone who has used PHP for a while knows that it has its ugly parts. Recently I've seen a whole swathe of PHP-bashing articles and that would fine if they were they are making a valid point, but some of it has just been - as I tweeted recently - "absolute drivel".

He directly refutes some of the points made in that article, points out a newer post from the same author (which misses some points as well) and finishes it off with a look at why he "still" uses PHP versus something like Closure or NodeJS for his development.

Despite known flaws and imperfections I continue to use PHP as my primary language because during all the time I spend worrying about which technology is the neatest, coolest or shiniest I could have built a new application to sell or finished another client site.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other thoughts about the language (and Phil's responses).