On his blog today, Jonnay looks at the Google "Summer of Code" (or as he calls it, their "Summer of Yawn"), specifically at one project, the PHP Macro Preprocessor.

This (as described) sounds exactly like a rewrite of the C preprocessor, which one can work with fairly easily in a PHP environment. To see this duplication of effort on something so boring and useless makes me question just how much PHP is its own language, versus a Frankensteins monster of language clones; see PHP 5's object system for a perfect example.

He comments that maybe the developer should have come up with a different way to do it instead of making what appears to be a sibling of the current processor. He also suggests that PHP developers step up and create methods for the current compiler to make using things like design patterns much simpler than they currently are.