On the PseudoCoder blog Matt has a new post - "PHP is a spork, Not a City Destroying Monster":

Here's an FJM style breakdown of Carl McDade's well thought out and persuasive article ("PHP is a skill, not a profession"). Haha...no really it's just flamebait crap.

Matt makes light of a lot of the things said in the Hiveminds article, including Carl's comments about the importance of PHP and how it compares to Carl's language of choice, ASP.NET.

In a new article on the Hiveminds website, one of their columnists, Carl shares his skewed perception of PHP - mainly that it's just not a profession (like .NET is).

I have to say that I am more in agreement with this line of thinking now than I was a couple of years ago. Regardless of how many Facebooks and Diggs show up on the web PHP will always only be given the same importance as HTML or JavaScript. PHP is something that is part of a skill set not something that you can say you do and be taken seriously as a web programmer. This was true 3 years ago is true now and quite honestly will be the case for many more years

He provides some results to back up his assumption, but they seem a bit tainted by his Microsoft slant on things (popularity rankings of 51.5% for ASP.NET but only 6.0% for PHP). He favors Visual Studio for development and suggests that there are no commercial CMSes for PHP.

Dave Marshall, a developer from Hull, England, has posted a few recommendations he thinks could help you land that next PHP job.

After reading this thread, I thought I'd spend some time writing about what I feel are some measures you can take to landing a job in PHP. This first part is going to concentrate on the kind of technical matters I think any PHP developer should at least have knowledge of, if not some kind of experience.

He suggests: as much programming experience as possible, experience with the full development lifecycle, knowing how to work with external libraries and frameworks, being able to adapt to development tools, knowing web application security, and some work with web services and a touch of system administration. He's not saying that you have to have all of these - just that the more you know, the better off you could be.

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.