Well, I’ve made it to PHP|tek in Chicago. I flew in last night, had a beer with Jason and then used the WiFi in the lobby to spin up an extra large EC2 instance (via RightScale) to do some benchmarks for one of my talks. I’m using the the XL instance because it [...]
php | tek 2008
May 20th, 2008Keywords and Language Simplicity
October 11th, 2007Well, I like programming language comparisons, so how could I resist this chart (via) promoting the simplicity of the io language by pointing out how few keywords it has. The interesting thing about this is that Java and PHP are tied on this measure of simplicity with 53 keywords. Perhaps that reflects Java’s [...]
php|tek Slides
May 19th, 2007Well, php|tek is over. It was a great conference and I’m really glad I went. This was my first PHP conference.
One of my main goals was to meet some of the folks at php|architect. I’ve been writing the Test Pattern column for them for over a year now. I was finally [...]
Delphi for PHP
February 23rd, 2007I have to comment on this week’s annoucement of Delphi for PHP. I was a Delphi programmer for about 5 years before taking up PHP about 6 years ago. What a convergence.
I have a great fondness and respect for the old Object Pascal based Delphi. Delphi’s VCL has been influential, inspiring the [...]
OOP is Mature, not Dead
January 7th, 2007I ran across an interesting series of blog posts by Karsten Wagner claiming that OOP is dead (part 2 and part 3). The premise behind these posts is that OOP has failed to deliver and that it is on the decline in favor of more functional or meta programming techniques. Maybe its true [...]
PDO versus MDB2
December 26th, 2006I was just putting together a small test program and I thought I would try using PDO. I really haven’t done anything serious with PDO, just try it a couple times. After recompiling PHP to include the mysql driver for PDO, I coded up the first version of my test program:
$db = new [...]
Why is PHP Code Considered Hard to Maintain?
November 9th, 2006Tobias Schlitt describes Tim Bray’s talk at the International PHP Conference. (PDF slides) Tim compares PHP, Java, and Rails along several dimensions. One of those dimensions is maintainability. Tim ranks PHP as least maintainable, Rails in the middle, and Java as most maintainable.
This is not a surprising ranking. [...]
Programming Language Trends via Google
May 10th, 2006There is a new google toy as of today: Google Trends. So of course, I wanted to see how PHP is faring on the trendy landscape. Here is a comparison of PHP, Java, C#, and Perl:
PHP Java C# Perl
PHP seems to be holding steady, or slightly declining. [...]
PHP Games
April 6th, 2006Earlier this morning, I ran across the Heroes of might and magic online mini-game (via digg). The game is written in PHP and uses the prototype and scriptaculous java script libraries. The interface is very drag and drop oriented and it uses Ajax to update game status. The graphics are very good. [...]
James Gosling on PHP
March 11th, 2006James Gosling, the “father of Java,” recently commented on PHP:
“PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems,” he continued, “but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages. But none of them attempt any serious breadth in the application domain and they both have really serious scaling and performance [...]