Matthew Turland has posted some of his thoughts about a topic that's being tossed around in the programming world these days - that PHP is "on its way out".

I have to vehemently disagree with this, and not just because PHP is my language of preference.

He gives several reasons to back up the claim including the fact that large players use the language in high-profile sites as well as the recent upturn of popularity the language has seen (as people come back from the over-hyped other languages).

He mentions collaborations between PHP companies/divisions as well as components made to more efficiently run PHP applications on other web server types.

The International PHP Magazine has posted the results of their latest poll (which features a PHP editor should have) on their site today.

Options included checking PHP syntax with one click, having a complete PHP reference inside, and bookmarking for easy code navigation. The one that was at the top, though, was the need to make finding classes and functions in documents quick and easy (with a resounding 46.9 percent). The runner up was down at 18.8 percent - "Navigate to errors in your code code automatically".

Be sure to check out this week's poll question too. They want to know which of the following is the category of PHP that most interests you:

• General PHP
• PHP & Business / Integration
• PHP & Databases
• PHP Design
• PHP Extensions
• PHP & XML
• PHP-GTK
• PHP Security