Ben congratulates Stefan for the nomination, for making the list when others in the PHP community didn't.

Stas, on the other hand, disagrees a bit with some of the comments made by the reporter that wrote up Stefan's piece:

I do not see how reporting a bunch of vulnerabilities (most of them fixed by the time of publication - for which thanks to Stefan Esser as the responsible reporter) is "thoroughly exposing the insecure nature of PHP". Bugs and bug reports - including ones that may affect security in one way or another - are nothing but commonplace in both open-source and non-open-source software worlds.

You can check out the full list for yourself on the eWeek site.

If there's a security hole in PHP, chances are it was found by Stefan Esser, an open-source security specialist. Esser's advisories about flaws in Linux, NetBSD, Samba, Ethereal, CVS, Subversion, MySQL and PHP are legendary. [...] His "Month of PHP Bugs" project thoroughly exposed the insecure nature of the widely deployed PHP language and forced a rethink about security in the open-source world.

Check out the slideshow for other people in the list including Michal Zalewski of Google and Ivan Krstic of the "One Laptop Per Child" project.

About a month ago I posted my Top 10 most influential programmers which caused a bit of a stir. So I then followed it up with an online poll which I said I would run for a month. The time is up and the final results are in.

Coming in at fifth place is Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP fame (topped by the likes of Linus Torvads and Alan Turing). As Nick mentions, though, it was interesting to see that Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans only received a handful of votes.