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There's an interesting post Jeff Atwood has made to his blog about PHP - its lack of standards, the way the language is structured and why none of that matters when it comes to its popularity.

PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory.

He includes links to several other articles that follow the "PHP sucks" train of thought too, but he notes that none of that really matters - its the popularity of PHP, its use in major corporate and social networking applications that is seeming to help drive it even more for developers to pick up and learn as a first web language.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

Responses from the community:

• Stas on the PHP 10.0 blog

Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.

The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.

Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:

• Security and PHP
• Working with PHP and the shell
• Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)

These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.

Community Comments:

• Cal Evans
• Luke Welling
• Harun Yayli

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.

There's an interesting new post over on the O'Reilly OnLamp.com website containing some statistics about their book sales for the past few years by language.

Recently there was a thread on the O'Reilly Radar started by Tim O'Reilly posting a chart that I put together from our book sales data. The chart showed comparative market share for most of the relevant programming languages. I have updated this in the chart below and have included 2005 data as well.

The chart shows the trends each of the languages' sales has followed over the course of the past years. PHP's on the last and seems to have held pretty steady in a time when very few seem to be trending upward.

As reported by the International PHP Magazine website, the results of the latest TIOBE Programming Community Index are in for the month and PHP is on the rise.

PHP has moved back up to take its spot back at #4 with (Visual) Basic falling back down to #5. As the trends graph shows, PHP had a sharp spike back up to overtake VB starting with the new year. If it continues the climb, it could be back up to levels it was during the middle of last year.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the worldwide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

There's a new article on The Register about a topic that's constantly argued in any language, much less PHP - application security.

PHP has become the most popular application language on the web, but common security mistakes by developers are giving PHP a bad name. Here's how PHP coding errors have become the new low-hanging fruit for attackers, contributing to the phishing problems on the web.

They talk first about the "great rise of PHP" on the web and how this surge of popularity also helped to show the great number of PHP security issues - both in applications written in it and in the language itself.

There's a mention of some of the upheaval that the PHP security community has had this year as well. They talk about the security of a LAMP installation versus a Windows machine, and their suggestions on helping to make the PHP world a better place.

PHP as been bumped down a spot in the popularity ranking provided by Tiobe Software for this month. It was pushed down to fifth place by Visual Basic moving up the ranks. The others in the top five are (in order) Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic.

The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TIOBE index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

According to their long term trends graph, PHP has still been gaining popularity overall, with only a bit of a dip lately. Other languages in the top five are also currently seeing similar dips in popularity too. Check out the full report for all of this month's details.

According to the latest stats from the TIOBE Programming Community Index, PHP has dropped down a spot from its previous standing last month down to the number five slot for November, being bumped down by (Visual) Basic.

As the long term trends graph shows, though, PHP and Basic are neck and neck, with one only gaining slightly over the other. As the International PHP Magazine site notes:

As the graph on TIOBE's web site indicates, PHP has been charting an uneven course, facing ups and just as many downs. However, PHP's position as of Feb 2006 is significantly higher than that of 2005.

You can get all of the stats and graphs for this latest month of results from the TIOBE site.

As mentioned by the Zend Developer Zone, PHP is still holding strong in the TIOBE Programming Community index n terms of how popular the language is. PHP comes in, once again, at number four on the list, bested by (in descending order) Java, C, and C++.

Most of the top languages on the index are staying around the same spot, but two languages - Visual Basic and Python - are nipping at the top four's heels. Things are getting pretty neck and neck for three languages - PHP, Basic, and C++. Their stats have been fluctuating just around each other, but not changing enough to make a difference in the listings.

You can check out the full listing on the TIOBE Software website (including a graph of each language in relation to the others).

In his latest post today, Stefan Mischook asks the question every PHP developer (and company looking to invest in the language) out there is wondering - will Ruby kill PHP?

With the recent rise in popularity of the Ruby programming language (largely driven by the excellent but not perfect web framework called Rails), I've noticed a little fear in the air...fear on the part of some people in the PHP community.

Will Ruby kill PHP? The short answer is: no.

He takes the reader on a trip through his reasoning - things like "Ruby is elegant, but not complex" and "Java nerds love Ruby". But, one of the things that is talked most about for Ruby (everything's an object) is the same reason why PHPers and those looking for a quick, powerful, easy-to-use language will still stick with PHP.

As PHP Magazine notes today, PHP has come in fifth (again) on the TIOBE Programming Community index.

The TIOBE Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

The popular search engines Google, MSN, and Yahoo! are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.

Those higher on the list are Java, C, Visual Basic, and C++, though C++ seems to be fading and Visual Basic growing by leaps and bounds. In the long term trends they record, PHP is showing a rising trend, quite a bit up from even just February of this year.

On the PowerHomeBix.com site today, there's this new article from Comdev Software asking "Why PHP in the web applications?"

With the growing demand of PHP in the web applications, PHP modules have been introduced to cater for web design and web development needs in order to shorten the development process and eliminate writing PHP codes from scratch.

The article talks about the huge growth lately in the number of frameworks and "ready-made modules" that has happened lately. It mentions that these are growing because PHP's growing (and PHP's growing because...well, you get the idea). These modules can play an important part in an application and can cut down development time greatly - always good from a business standpoint.

Back in 2004, PHP was named number one language of 2004. Since then, it's hovered in the top ten, maintaining its popularity and ranking, including a move up from 5th place to 4th (as mentioned on the Zend Developer Zone).

The TIOBE Programming Community Index has been updated for April 2006 showing their view on the status of programming languages in the development community. PHP moves up a spot from 5th to 4th. The long-in-the-tooth C fades back a bit relinquishing 1st place to Java, while C++ gains on its brethren with PHP biting on its heels (a margin of 0.02 between their percentages). PHP has a higher climb rate so expect another big move in the coming year.

For those that are wondering "why should I care?" about this random index? The post mentions how they come up with their numbers. It's mainly a popularity contest, but it's useful for seeing which way the public sways. The post also mentions thatm while it's one way to check the popularity, slightly altering the search parameters can give dramatically different results.

In his latest blog entry, Robert Peake looks at something that PHP is certainly susceptible to, given that other languages like JSP, ASP, and Ruby are always being compared to it - the popularity of the language. Robert asks "Does Popularity Matter?"

Nexen recently posted a great survey on PHP usage (perhaps they beat NetCraft to the punch this time?). We've seen these trends before: PHP is on the steady rise for numbers of installations. Coupled with Apache, it is the most popular web development platform around.

My question is: does that really matter?

By "matter" I mean, "does it affect PHP's credibility in a positive way?"; and also: "does it prove anything?"

He wonders if the numbers that show on the surveys are PHP usage because people want to use it, or if it's simply that it's preinstalled in so many places these days (and has a low "barrier to entry") that it's being mistaken for popularity. He also mentions something that I think we all, as PHP developers and ambassadors, should think about:

So, rather than the community resting on its collective laurels for one more year of increased installations, I encourage us all to consider what can be done to promote PHP through education, standards, and best practices to its rightful place as much, much more than simply a popular web development language.