Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:14 UTC
Today, PHP Architect and Pro PHP Podcast held their first live podcast (Interview with Andi Gutmans) since PHP Architect announced their “acquisition” of the podcast. However, due to some technical difficulties, the live feed was canceled after about fifteen minutes into the interview, and the audience was unable to participate in the Q & A session at the end.
Nevertheless, I do have a few notes from the interview to share.
PHP Collaboration Project
The Zend PHP Collaboration Project, often referred to as the “Zend Framework,” was on the minds of many of the attendees as the interview began, and Marcus Whitney dove right into it, asking Andi why Zend decided to undertake this project. Andi said that Zend feels there are three things needed to take PHP to the next level; the PHP Collaboration Project is made up of these three things:
- a solid framework/development environment
- enriched development tools (Eclipse)
- best practices
Zend is using the PHP Collaboration Project as a vehicle to promote and accomplish these goals to advance PHP.
PHP Competing With .NET
Marcus asked Andi why he has been quoted in the past as saying that Java is not PHP’s main competition, but, rather, .NET provides the most competition. Andi ellaborated on this, saying that the Web is moving toward a more agile development model, which is why he feels that Java is not particularly suited for the Web. Instead, .NET and PHP are both particularly suited to solve the Web problem, and so it is only natural for .NET to be PHP’s main competition.
PHP Strengths
Andi continued his discussion of PHP vs. .NET by highlighting the major strength of PHP and the main weakness of Microsoft (and, thus, .NET). He said that the greatest strength PHP has is its large community base, while Microsoft has never been able to solidify itself in the server market over Apache—the software giant’s greatest weakness in the competition against PHP.
At this point in the interview, the technical difficulties took over and the audience was unable to participate in the remainder of the interview, so this blog post serves merely as a teaser. I believe they’ll post the rest of the interview by Monday, though, so look for it, then.
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Tags: framework, php, zend, zend-framework
Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:03 UTC
This is in response to Chris Shiflett’s “Technical Vocabulary and Grammar” post. My comment became so long that I decided to blog it instead.
Being someone with a degree in English . . .
I’ve always heard to treat collective nouns (groups, etc.) as plurals. So, “Brain Bulb are . . .” would be correct. However, reading through Lapsing Into a Comma by Bill Walsh (pg. 101) and The Associated Press Stylebook 2005 under the “collective nouns” entry, it would appear that nouns denoting unit take on singular verbs and pronouns, while nouns denoting individual items use plural verbs. For example (taken from Stylebook):
Right: A thousand bushels is a good yield. (A unit.)
Right: A thousand bushels were created. (Individual items.)
Right: The data is sound. (A unit.)
Right: The data have been carefully collected. (Individual items.)
Thus, a company name could possibly use either form, depending on the context. I can’t think of an example off the top of my head that would illustrate the differences.
As for periods and commas within quotation marks, I think this is often a confusing issue for professionals, much less students. In American English, though, commas and periods go inside the quotation marks, period; semicolons and colons never go inside quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation points depend on the context. Contrary to popular belief about usage of commands, etc., there are no exceptions to this rule. (See section 2.7.7 in the MLA Handbook, pg. 92 in Comma, and pg. 334 in Stylebook.)
I agree that this can lead to confusion in technical writing when explaining something to enter at the command prompt, etc. However, to resolve this, I would personally not place the command in quotation marks. Instead, I would set it in a monospaced typeface to indicate that it is a command:
Then delete a line from the file by typing dd.
Now, for computer jargon. The one thing that has been bothering me lately is this:
PC != Windows
PC != x86 processor
The term “PC” refers to a “personal computer,” which could be any computer running Windows OR Macintosh operating systems, x86 OR PowerPC processors. What’s going to happen to this term now that Macs are running on an Intel (x86) processor? Nothing. Everyone at my office will still call their computers “PCs” and mine a “Mac.”
Even the publishing community refers to Windows-based computers as “PCs.” I can’t find any guidelines in my AP style book on this, though.
UPDATE (23 Jan 2006): Chris points out that even Apple uses the PC vs. Mac distinction in their promotion of the Intel Core Duo when they say on their Web site “What’s an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it’s ever done in a PC.”
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Tags: grammar, language
