Derick Rethans has a new post today with a few comments about another blog post from over on blog.iworks.at - "Is PHP staying the language I want to work with?"

Through Planet PHP I saw the blog entry "Is PHP staying the language I want to work with?", for with comments are cowardly disabled. Although the way classes are handled is debatable, moaning that PHP 4.4 breaks "return ($ret)" when returning by reference only shows that the programmer has had no clue about references in the first place. If you place () around a variable, you're making it an expression. You can only return variables by references, not expressions. The return-by-reference in this function never could have worked as it should have in the first place. Clue: Don't use "return ()", but just "return ".

The iworks.at post makes the point that there are still some issues with how the Zend Engine sees itself and other parts of PHP, and that maybe, just maybe, it's a bad sign of things to come. Derick, however, does his best to refute these ideas...