Web pioneer hits critics with Lisp gauntlet
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Higher-level challenge Maverick programmer and venture capitalist Paul Graham is challenging all comers to beat him after finally releasing a working version of his Lisp update â called Arc.â¦
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A few days back there was a post on the "The Codist" blog about why the author would never quite understand the appeal of PHP to the masses and some of his thoughts behind it. Well, there was such an outcry and response to his comments that he's written up another post on what he learned from comments made.   Clearly I touched a nerve. However I did learn a lot of things that you don't read in a quickly tutorial on PHP. The whole point of writing something is to get feedback, positive or negative, and hopefully learn from it.   He admits that his experience with PHP and its developers has been limited, so his perspective might have been thrown off a bit. He still holds to one thing from the previous article, though - that PHP just isn't for him.
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Work begins on a Perl 6 regexp parser, and Unicode manipulation of strings prompts discussion on the language list.
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Because anyone can edit Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia's reliability varies wildly. Now a computer science professor hopes to give users a better baloney detector: software that flags questionable lines in Wikipedia entries.
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DevShed continues their series looking at connecting a PHP5 script to the powerful Yahoo! search backend with part four of the series today. This part focuses on reworking some of the previous examples to make them more modular using custom defined functions.   Logically, these examples can be really useful for learning the basic concepts surrounding the use of these search services, but undoubtedly, it's necessary to modify and improve their source code to make it more compact and completely reusable.   They start the overhaul with the web search (complete with example results) then push on to the video and image searches and work them over the same way.
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Mike Wallner has thrown together some stats for the latest edition of the pecl/http package to test its response performance.   The results surprised me, because it clearly shows that the performance drop for starting the PHP engine and doing the neccessary negotiation to provide caching is not that bad.   There's a chart of the results as well as a full PDF with all of the stats the graph maps out. He includes the legend to make the graph easier to understand.
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Opera CTO HÃ¥kon Wium Lie gives us a video tour of his OLPC prototype. Can you guess which browser it's running? In Monkey Bites. In Monkey Bites.
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In another quick note from Chris Shiflett, there's a summary of php|works and some of the comments made about it:
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Back in the days of stone knives and bearskins applications were  things that were written in cretinous languages like COBOL that  ran on wierd 71 bit architectures and used messed up file formats like  JCL and VSAM files or whatever.  What's a 'Data Division'?  Some whiny  80s band from Manchester?      Of course today we are so much  smarter.  If you look at the evolution, from ML, to branched languages  to structured programming to OOP, and from 3270 applications, to PC  apps to client server to web apps, you can clearly see how the  applications programmer transformed himself from knuckle dragging  simian to homo sapiens. That's the stereotype, right?    We have a name for all that old stuff, a pejorative name:  'legacy'.[1]   I'm here to tell you that the web application is the new  legacy.
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On LinuxJournal today, there's a new article from Marco Tabini about the power of PHP as a multi-purpose language (and not just for web pages anymore).
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Ligaya Turmelle has relayed some great news in her latest blog entry, something that the web's been needing for a long time - a new group from the W3C created specifically for enhancing the HTML standard.   Now I have to admit to being curious about what is going on - after all anything new dealing with the web affects me as PHP coder. Since the W3C is supposedly interested in input from the Web community and content developers, I decided to see who from PHP would be there. Granted it is very early for the formation of the group so it didn't really surprise me to see no one from PHP that I know or heard about in there, but I wonder if anyone from the PHP Group will become a "invited expert" somewhere down the road.   The group is looking for members to help define this next generation of markup on the web. Check out their page for some of the qualifications needed to participate and for some of the upcoming events.W3C Launches New HTML Working Group
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Paul Jones will be one of the presenters at this year's php/db|works Conference happening up in Toronto this week and he's offering a teaser of his talk (here's the synopsis) for those interested - "Organizing Your PHP Projects".   Fans of Henry Hazlitt's "Economics in One Lesson" will recognize the kind of talk I have in store, although I don't have the time available to expound in detail the way Hazlitt does. The talk will consist of a one-sentence lesson for you to remember when deciding how to organize your PHP project, whether it's a library, an application, a CMS, or a framework. I'll then explain how to apply the One Lesson in your project, and the various follow-on effects the One Lesson will have on your project organization.   He also jokes that he'll be the only presenter to use references to livestock, Jimmy Hoffa, and Mir as a part of the talk. He's even included a slide of the presentation for even more info.
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Alexey Zakhlestin gave a talk for the PHPThinktank IRC channel recently on the topic of YAML, PHP, and some of the work that he's done combining the two.   It happened a bit of spontaneously, so noone was invited. It was my first try, to make introduction to yaml for php prgrammers, and if there is more interest I will give another talk which will cover more details, this time with proper scheduling :)   You can check out the log of the discussion for his entire talk (covering topics like what YAML is, where to get more information on it, some of its features, and a mention of the Syck library for parsing it).
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Aaron Wormus has a new note on his blog today about his presentation at this year's Zend/PHP Conference & Expo and another speaker he's excited to hear.    One of the Zend conference sessions that I'm pretty excited about is Don Samisa Abeysinghe's (of WSO2) "Fully Fletched Web Services with PHP".   I'll be presenting a session on "Moving to PHP5 with Style." This tutorial/case study will be based on experience in transitioning several codebases from PHP4 to PHP5, creating unit tests & started a move towards a service based architecture without a complete platform rewrite.    Aaron's talk fits under the banner of the "PHP Development" talks, including others on topics like hosting PHP applications on Windows, working with PDO, unicoding in PHP6, and using PHPUnit.
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In his latest blog post, P&aacute;draic Brady talks about a "sweeter alternative" to using Smarty for your site's templating - Template Lite.    Use the term Template Engine in a PHP forum and the word "Smarty" will inevitably crop up. I like Smarty but, similar to a few PHP libraries, it's very bloated.   I try to keep my applications lean and mean - small, fast, and adaptable. Unfortunately, Smarty disagrees with my needs. It's bloated design while packing a mighty punch, uses a chunk of memory and processor time I dislike. Since I also develop open source apps which end up on shared hosts, my concerns are even more justified.   Enter Mark Dickenson. Mark is the developer of a Smarty alternative: Template Lite.    He talks about what Template Lite is and what kinds of advantages it has over Smarty, including staying try to its name. P&aacute;draic measures it as not only being faster but also having 50% of the memoery footprint that Smarty does. He seems to favor it for those places when he just needs something light and easy on a site.
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In a new post on his blog, Kore Nordmann takes a look at a feature that's been around a long time (first introduced in a message board application) - BBCodes.   The discussion on my blog post "Do not use regular expressions for parsing" ended in a discussion about BBcodes in general. I just used them as an example to demonstrate why it it is impossible to parse such a language with regular expressions - and mentioned in a subclause, that I don't see any sense in using them at all.   He looks at some of the myths surrounding them and their use (more secure, easier to use, safer than HTML) and gives some reasons for making teh choice of HTML over them.
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Perl has a wealth of good web frameworks. One of the season's toolkits, CGI::Application, has recently seen a bout of new development to make building web apps faster and much easier. Mark Stosberg demonstrates these new features and how to use them.