In case you weren't able to make it (or missed the live stream) Rasmus Lerdorf gave a presentation last night at Etsy as a part of their "Code as Craft" series. They recorded the session and you can watch it here.

He talks about a few things:

• the history of the PHP language
• the state of PHP currently
• what's coming up in 2012
• and touches some on the upcoming PHP 5.4 features.

You can find more about their "Code as Craft" series (and other videos) on the Etsy page.

In this new post from Watts Martin he suggests that "PHP is not an acceptable COBOL" - the language, while popular and useful now, may not age as well in the future (say 10 or 15 years).

PHP is to the web what Visual Basic is to Windows, but even more so: a powerful enough language to do nearly anything you want, ubiquitous, easy to get up and running (on many web hosts it's pre-installed), and forgiving of shitty code. [...] While I'm happy to see PHP start getting "modern" language bits (you Lisp hackers, stop snickering), the more I'm exposed to modern PHP in practice the more I think it's doomed. [...] A friend compared PHP to the COBOL of the web, and indeed, that seems to be COBOL's philosophy, too.

He also mentions some of the things available for PHP - frameworks, dependency management, PEAR, PECL - and some of his struggles with each. There's plenty of feedback on the post with some good interaction back from the post's author.

Recently the PHP project announced a move to git as the primary version control system for the language's development. In a new post to SitePoint's PHPMaster.com site, Davey Shafik explains what that means to the average developer and what you can expect of the future.

Just over two years since its move from the antiquated CVS to Subversion (SVN), PHP is once again on the move: this time, to Git. Well, eventually. The migration from CVS to SVN was a huge one and took many months. The need for the PHP project to support its user base, hook scripts (commit mailing list, etc.) means that any change of revision control software means quite a large commitment. This is why even though the voting is over, and the dust has settled, we won't be seeing PHP on Git until the end of this year.

Davey shares his vote - pro-git - and explains what his choice (and many others') means for the language, including a modified patch acceptance policy and a convenience for developers to be able to work anywhere.

All in all, I feel migrating from Subversion to Git can only be a good thing for the PHP project and the community as a whole. [...] it is pretty clear that the PHP development community is in favor of the decision.

As mentioned by CodeIgniter.com Phil Sturegon has posted a wrapup of this year's CICON2011 (CodeIgniter conference, US-side) that happened in New York on the 20th.

CICON2011 happened and it was awesome. We had 100 CodeIgniter nerds in the same place - which is the biggest collection of CI nerds since 54 at CICON2010 in the UK, but this event was so much better. We had a whole load of announcements that have changed the way the framework is contributed to and improved the whole community for the better. This is not me blowing smoke up my backside, but feedback I have had from attendees. So, what did you miss?

Some of the things on his list have already been announced through other channels, but it's good to have them all in one spot:

• The move of the project to Github
• the merging of CodeIgniter Core and Reactor
• The merge of the Sparks library functionality into the core
• as well as some general positivity in the community

He's also linked to a few other summaries of other folks that were in attendance: Adam Fairholm, Frank Michel and Greg Aker.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos gives his perspective on the recently announced PHP fork by Robert Eisele that has the community buzzing with comments from both sides of the fence.

A fork is a new version of a project that a separate group of developers that want to give the project a different route. A new PHP forked version was created by Robert Eisele to address needs that he felt were important.

He mentions the forked version as updated with the changes Robert wanted to see made and a few other concerns that have come from it. One issue is the PHP name and licensing problems and another is whether or not you should use this fork (and what its future might be).

The International PHP Conference has posted the video they recorded at their 2010 event of Pierre Joye and Johann-Peter Hartmann's keynote presentation "PHP: Yesterday's Scala and the Cobol of Tomorrow".

PHP came a long way, and we are no longer the cool new kid on the block. On the other hand side we are still far away from being the new cobol, and there is a lot of great stuff going on inside php and the php community. What happened to PHP the last few years, what is happening right now and what will be the next 5 years? Is PHP ready for nowadays trends? Does it fit for Social Web, NoSQL and HTML 5? Should You better be learning Scala right now?

The video runs about 45 minutes and compares some of the features Scala offers, a brief history of PHP, some of the trends of current development and where PHP needs to go in the future to keep up with trends.

In a recent post to his blog Kenny Katzgrau talks about why PHP was a ghetto (both on the quality front and the public perception) but how things have turned around and the language is being perceived as stronger all the time.

I was talking with the Co-founder of a pretty cool start-up in DUMBO the other day about why the non-PHP development world generally has such disdain for PHP and the community surrounding it. He brought up an interesting point that stuck with me, largely because I hadn't heard it before. [...] He didn't say the actual language was poor - he said it was the general culture surrounding the language, which is usually iconified by a language's founder, that seems to encourage bad practices. That is, PHP code bases tend to be hacky and unmaintainable.

He goes through a few things in PHP's past including the influence that Rasmus Lerdorf has had from the beginning and how the "pizza-faced adolescent years" of PHP have been a big part of the problem. Because of its past, PHP had been considered a "ghetto" but with recent improvements like encouragement of coding standards, full-stack frameworks, great unit testing tools and the same low barrier for entry, the language is gathering its strength and moving away from its past into something new.

In a response to some of the things said in this post to the CodeIgniter blog, Phil Sturgeon has posted some thoughts of his own about how the company (EllisLab) is currently handling the CodeIgniter framework and what kind of future he sees out there for it.

Times have been hard for the developers of CodeIgniter - EllisLab and they have addressed this in a few ways: A spot on the ExpressionEngine Podcast, a few articles explaining the future of EllisLab and ExpressionEngine and how they plan to take things forward. Sadly, as always us CodeIgniter developers have been left with not much more than a nod and a pat on the head.

He mentions some of their responses and what he sees happening in the CodeIgniter community - a "stable enough" version of CodeIgniter 2, the departure of two members of the EllisLab staff who had large impacts on CodeIgniter and the change and involvement that seems to be happening in several community resources (hint: numbers are dropping dramatically).

Be sure to check out the comments for opinions from CodeIgniter users, community members and thoughts from an employee of EllisLab (Derek Jones).

On the Web Builder Zone there's a new article posted from Giorgio Sironi asking readers what they think is the next direction web applications will head towards.

PHP is one of the most used web development programming languages in the world, and from its original creation in 1995 has evolved much both as a platform, with drivers for nearly every existent database, and as a language itself, with the introduction of several new programming paradigms.

He gives an overview of the history of the PHP language and how, at each turn, the improvements lead to more robust use of these features. He mentions three major advancements these updates have allowed developers to make - first procedural code, then object-oriented advancements and finally, with the release of the PHP 5.3 series, functional programming.

Finally, he asks the reader for a little feedback on what will become the next big thing for the PHP language in the coming years

With the passing of PHP's 15th birthday recently, Marco Tabini has taken the opportunity to share some of his opinions on where the language has come from and where he sees it going in the future.

Milestones are not as important in our industry as they are in our lives - the way I see it, if you work in the computer field and turn to look at back at what has been, someone will have passed you by - but there are some very important lessons that can be learned from the story of PHP.

He talks about PHP's direction (and sometimes lack there of), what developers from other languages think about PHP and some of what it will take to get both the community and the PHP development group to step up and overcome the challenges to making the future of the language better.