A friend of mine who shall remain nameless pointed a post out to me on the PHP DZone web site recently. Noting that the article's content was misinformed at best and downright ignorant at worst, even when examining it sheerly from the author's knowledge of PHP as a language, this friend asked that I set the author straight.

He mentions his comments on the post correcting the author on some points as well as a more "clued in" post on the xml.lt website talking about using PHP's DOM functionality instead.

In chapter three "Connecting to the Database" at step 5 of you will get duplicate columns returned if you use the latest version of PHP.

By adding in a "OCI_ASSOC+" to the oci_fetch_array statement, all is corrected. This was due to a change in how oci_fetch_array worked (as seen in this bug).

Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.

He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.