Recently on his blog Jack Diederich took a look at three different interpreters for Ruby, PHP and Python to see how they were implemented as compared to the language they're used in.

The other day I went poking around the Ruby and PHP interpreters (the current stable versions). I hadn't looked inside PHP since the 4.x series and Ruby I had never checked out. Like CPython the internals of both PHP and Ruby look something like their resulting language, but in C. For each interpreter I just compiled it and looked at how core types and extension types were implemented.

For PHP, he went with the PHP 5.2.13 release and talks about the compile process (a bit spammy), running the unit tests that come included and how the interpreter handles data types, core types and objects.

According to Matt Asay, both PHP and Perl are crashing the enterprise party and are rapidly closing the gap between themselves and some of the more traditional "enterprise-ish" tools out there (like Java or .NET).

While dynamic programming languages like PHP and Python dominate Web engineering, the signs that they are breaking Java and .Net's hold on the enterprise are less clear. Forrester recently reported that PHP claims the highest instance of open source use within enterprises, at 57 percent penetration. But it's also the case that the bulk of enterprise software spending goes to Java and .Net-based software. Who is winning?

He links to a graph from Indeed showing the trends in the job market with PHP and Python (two dynamic languages) shooting their way to the top.

No, Java and .Net aren't going away anytime soon. But then, neither are the dynamic programming languages, which are increasingly blessed "enterprise ready." This is good for enterprise software, and potentially very good for ActiveState, SugarCRM, and others who build their businesses on dynamic programming languages.

On the IBM developerWorks site there's a recent article looking to help PHP developers bridge the gap to Python by teaching some of the beginning steps in this other, different sort of language.

This article gives you a bit of exposure to Python. It assumes that you have no knowledge of that programming language, so some of what you read here might seem a bit basic. It focuses on comparing and contrasting Python with PHP - not because one language is better than the other but because of a simple truth: It's often easier to learn new things by referring back to something you already know.

They start off by introducing the language and talking about the differences between them including the differing syntax, Python's concept of mutability/immutability and the non-positional argument handling. From there, it's all about the basics - making a sample script, using loops, working with strings, conditionals, lists and dictionaries. A full sample script shows you how to pull it all together to pull in a list of files and outputs basic information about them.

In response to a question he got about the choice of a laguage (PHP or Python) for a web application, Terry Chay has responded pretty simply:

I still need to write another article on Python, but the short answer is I think if it's web, PHP is probably the better choice.

He does have a few other things to consider that might make the choice swing the other way though - budgetary concerns that might push you to something a bit cheaper (like Python and the Google App Engine) or if you'd want to keep things the same throughout the whole application and is more flexible than just a web language.

PHP may be the best web language out there. But it certainly isn't the only one. It's one approach, one that stresses configuration over convention, stupidity over smarts, practicality over elegance.

The Enterprise PHP Magazine has pointed out some facts (slightly skewed, it seems) about the availability of a few different types of programmers, PHP included, according to several search engines.

I updated the estimation so we can have most accurate results. The table below illustrates the results found, I have just truncated Bing results to 1M to have more readable chart, after all I don't believe there are 50M resumes indexed by Microsoft - and that's another topic.

The results show about 780,000 PHP-related resumes on Google, 541,000 on Yahoo and the (obviously incorrect) 59,700,000 from Bing.com. There are a lot of PHP developers out there, but I can't imagine quite that many. Either way, even the numbers from the other search engines come in over the counts of the other three languages.

On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico takes a look at finding geo-proximity to a find a location on a map and plot it and find the distance to another point - all with the help of PHP, Python and SQL.

Basically, what I'm doing is plotting a radius around a point on a map, which is defined by the distance between two points on the map given their latitudes and longitudes. To achieve this I'm using the Haversine formula (spherical trigonometry). This equation is important in navigation, it gives great-circle distances between two points on a sphere from their longitudes and latitudes.

Included in the post is the code for three different implementations - PHP, Python and SQL, all using that same formula.

In this new post to his blog Vinu Thomas shows how to install an application onto his S60 phone to access his WordPress blog.

I just came across this S60 freeware today which allows me to manage my wordpress blog on my E71. Wordmobi is a Python app which can be used to perform the following tasks on the blog: create/publish new posts, include images in the posts, view/approve comments and delete posts.

You'll need to install Python on the phone before you can get Wordmobi up and running. He includes screenshots for quick blog setup and the resulting listing of posts it pulls in.

Douglas Clifton has taken some time to look at a group of the web application frameworks out there (not just PHP - Pearl, Python and Ruby too) and offer up some opinions on them. This new post is the result.

It just wouldn't be fair after my last post to ignore the tried-and-true server-side Web application frameworks. I am certainly familiar with all of them, though I haven't necessarily used every one in a production environment.

The among the PHP frameworks mentioned are: Drupal, CodeIgniter, CakePHP and Symfony. His personal choice was CodeIgniter:

It's light weight, fast, and stays out of your way. There are any number of class modules to choose from, and you can discard what you don't need to lighten the load even more.

On the Hurricane Software website they've done a comparison between PHP and Python judging them based on things like feature set, community and documentation.

What does it take to state one language better than other? One answer can be flexibility, development friendly, licensing policy (open source or commercial), community, portability, dynamic typing, support for variable number of function arguments and ability to freeze live objects in a string representation. Documentation of course is a major player when you choose a language because you still have to sharpen your skill and you haven't worked on that particular language yet.

They go through a list of the prominent features of each language as well as some basic benchmarks for mathematical operations like finding primes below 10000 and looping with a bit of calculation. They compare the two languages' speed of execution, speed of writing, ease of setup and portability.

You can also listen to the report via the in-page player.

As a part of a current project Daniel Cousineau came across the need to bridge two languages - PHP and Python - via some serialized variables. This new post on his blog shows how he did it.

So I'm in the planning stages of a project where I'll probably be doing some heavy lifting in Python and serving up the output through PHP. Obviously this will entail transmitting data between Python and PHP and while I haven't had a chance to do performance testing to see if it's worth it to save to a database, the only other option was to serialize the data to a file that PHP could parse quickly. Obviously, the output from serialize() is going to be the fastest way to recieved the data.

As he was working on his own implementation, he came across a currently existing Python library (that adds the serialize support) and but found it lacking for what he needed. He continued on, working up his own customized implementation with all the features he needed. He includes both the Python and PHP code (cut and paste ready) as well as the results from the serialization of different data types.