PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

He includes links to several other articles that follow the "PHP sucks" train of thought too, but he notes that none of that really matters - its the popularity of PHP, its use in major corporate and social networking applications that is seeming to help drive it even more for developers to pick up and learn as a first web language.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

Responses from the community:

• Stas on the PHP 10.0 blog

The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.

Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:

• Security and PHP
• Working with PHP and the shell
• Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)

These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.

Community Comments:

• Cal Evans
• Luke Welling
• Harun Yayli

Recently there was a thread on the O'Reilly Radar started by Tim O'Reilly posting a chart that I put together from our book sales data. The chart showed comparative market share for most of the relevant programming languages. I have updated this in the chart below and have included 2005 data as well.

The chart shows the trends each of the languages' sales has followed over the course of the past years. PHP's on the last and seems to have held pretty steady in a time when very few seem to be trending upward.

PHP has moved back up to take its spot back at #4 with (Visual) Basic falling back down to #5. As the trends graph shows, PHP had a sharp spike back up to overtake VB starting with the new year. If it continues the climb, it could be back up to levels it was during the middle of last year.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the worldwide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

PHP has become the most popular application language on the web, but common security mistakes by developers are giving PHP a bad name. Here's how PHP coding errors have become the new low-hanging fruit for attackers, contributing to the phishing problems on the web.

They talk first about the "great rise of PHP" on the web and how this surge of popularity also helped to show the great number of PHP security issues - both in applications written in it and in the language itself.

There's a mention of some of the upheaval that the PHP security community has had this year as well. They talk about the security of a LAMP installation versus a Windows machine, and their suggestions on helping to make the PHP world a better place.

The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.

As the long term trends graph shows, though, PHP and Basic are neck and neck, with one only gaining slightly over the other. As the International PHP Magazine site notes:

As the graph on TIOBE's web site indicates, PHP has been charting an uneven course, facing ups and just as many downs. However, PHP's position as of Feb 2006 is significantly higher than that of 2005.

You can get all of the stats and graphs for this latest month of results from the TIOBE site.

Most of the top languages on the index are staying around the same spot, but two languages - Visual Basic and Python - are nipping at the top four's heels. Things are getting pretty neck and neck for three languages - PHP, Basic, and C++. Their stats have been fluctuating just around each other, but not changing enough to make a difference in the listings.

You can check out the full listing on the TIOBE Software website (including a graph of each language in relation to the others).

With the recent rise in popularity of the Ruby programming language (largely driven by the excellent but not perfect web framework called Rails), I've noticed a little fear in the air...fear on the part of some people in the PHP community.

Will Ruby kill PHP? The short answer is: no.

He takes the reader on a trip through his reasoning - things like "Ruby is elegant, but not complex" and "Java nerds love Ruby". But, one of the things that is talked most about for Ruby (everything's an object) is the same reason why PHPers and those looking for a quick, powerful, easy-to-use language will still stick with PHP.