In this recent post to his blog, Chris Hartjes answers his request for a "rant topic" by responding to a question about "how to not suck at PHP" (from Travis Northcutt).

I thought about this question for a while and have some thoughts on what it really means to know how to not suck at building things using PHP. In my never even remotely humble opinion I think the key is to understand what PHP is really good at.

He talks about how PHP had the early-adoption advantage at first with Apache, but how things have changed so much since then. Now, he proposes, PHP's popularity and usefulness is based on what it can do as a language without messing with frameworks at all. He's worried that, once someone picks up a framework, it'll become so ingrained that they won't know what "plain old PHP" can do (or how to work with it).

So my advice to Travis is that he should worry about learning to use PHP like glue and correctly identify the problems he is trying to solve NOW instead of worrying about the problems he might have to solve later. There will be time to fix your problems. Some of those will be solved by using tools that are not written in PHP, but PHP can still glue them together.

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.

On the KingFoo blog today there's an excellent look at everything new coming up in PHP 5.4, the next version of PHP set to be released in early February.

PHP 5.4 will be stable soon. In this post I'll try to give you an overview and examples of the new PHP 5.4 features. If you want to try out PHP 5.4 (which is currently in RC3), it has to be installed first. I suggest that you try this out on a virtual machine so you don't break your current PHP version.

Improvements on the list include:

• Improved Session Extension
• Built-in webserver
• Traits
• Array dereferencing
• Method calls through arrays
• Binary notation for integers
• Instantiate a class without running constructor
• Improved JSON extension
• Improved CURL extension

And this is just a start - they detail each of the improvements and provide code where needed to illustrate the update. They also link over to the PHP.net manual (or PHP bug tracker) for more information on the new feature/change.

On the Udemy blog there's a new post with a large infographic showing "who reigns supreme" comparing Ruby, Python and PHP (don't worry, this isn't flamebait...it's actual good stats comparing the state of these three languages).

Just as the Japanese, Spanish and French languages are uniquely different, programming languages also have their variations, some more popular and easier to use than others. With the recent introduction of some new ones, there is a 'war' of modern day languages. What's easier and faster to use is not always the best option.

The graphic includes stats like:

• Usability ratings
• Popularity in the TIOBE index
• How much it's discussed (from the IEEE Spectrum, IRC)
• The number of open job postings
• Average run time/lines of code

Check out the full post for more interesting data.

The PHP development group has officially announced the release of PHP 5.3.9, the latest in the 5.3.x series.

The PHP development team would like to announce the immediate availability of PHP 5.3.9. This release focuses on improving the stability of the PHP 5.3.x branch with over 90 bug fixes, some of which are security related.

Bugfixes and updates in this release include the max_input_vars directive, an autoloading issue with is_a and changes to the FPM SAPI module. You can see the full list of changes here or just go over and download this latest release and get to installing - source, Windows binaries.

The PHP development team has officially released PHP 5.4.0 RC5, the latest (and the second to last) release candidate for the next major version of the language.

The PHP development team announces the 5th release candidate of PHP 5.4. PHP 5.4 includes new language features and removes several legacy (deprecated) behaviours. Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Windows QA site.

Bugs fixed in this version include a few to the Core, SAPI/CLI SAPI, PHP-FPM support and improvements to the session extension. Download and test out this latest version on your systems - the more feedback they receive the better! You can report issues you might find on the PHP bug tracker.

Sharon Levy has a new post to her blog showing a trick she's come up with to show the PHP version information (usually found in the phpinfo) even when it's disabled.

Sometimes the most crucial, basic piece of information can seem so hard to find. For example, suppose you wanted to find out what version of PHP your remote webhost provides to shared hosting users? What would you do? [...] For development purposes it can be helpful having phpinfo() available, but on a live shared host, you may discover as I did recently that it is no longer available; your host may have disabled it.

She includes three other ways you can use to get the version of PHP you're working with:

• If you have command line access, running "php -v"
• Using the phpversion function (or PHP_VERSION constant)
• Appending a certain value to the URL (only works in some cases)

On PHPClasses.org today the latest episode (#19) of the "Lately in PHP" podcast has been posted. In it Manual Lemos and Ernani Joppert: talk about the concept of a JIT (just in time) compiler for PHP (such as HipHop or Phalanger).

JIT compilation is the main topic of the episode 19 of the Lately in PHP podcast presented by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert who received as guests Miloslav Beno of the Phalanger team and Nuno Lopes of the PECL LLVM project to discuss this and other interesting topics of the PHP scene.

The hosts and their guests talk about compiling PHP, things that happened in 2011 and look forward to what's to come in the world of PHP in 2012. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to the podcast feed.

On the Sankuru blog there's a recent post looking at the construction of a simple bytecode compiler with a virtual machine as written in PHP (for Expression Language).

In my previous blog posts, I demonstrated how we can use the builtin PCRE library, to create a lexer in Php. I also showed how to use Bison-generated LALR1 parser tables in Php. In this blog post, I will re-use these lexing and parsing facilities to compile EL programs from within Php.

He uses his lexer/parser (available for download) in an example program that outputs some values and does some simple mathematical operations. There's sections detailing the Bison grammar used, execution stacks, callbacks and the bytecode it produces.

In a new post to his blog today Phil Sturgeon responds to some comments made in another post about PHP not "being an acceptable COBOL".

Anyone who has used PHP for a while knows that it has its ugly parts. Recently I've seen a whole swathe of PHP-bashing articles and that would fine if they were they are making a valid point, but some of it has just been - as I tweeted recently - "absolute drivel".

He directly refutes some of the points made in that article, points out a newer post from the same author (which misses some points as well) and finishes it off with a look at why he "still" uses PHP versus something like Closure or NodeJS for his development.

Despite known flaws and imperfections I continue to use PHP as my primary language because during all the time I spend worrying about which technology is the neatest, coolest or shiniest I could have built a new application to sell or finished another client site.

Be sure to check out the comments for some other thoughts about the language (and Phil's responses).