In a conversation with a coworker, we distilled several programming languages’ design philosophies down to a single sentence.
Here’s what we came up with:
Java: Protect the Developer From Themselves
Ruby: Be the Developer’s Language
Python: There is One True Way
PHP: eh
Do you agree? Disagree? What are the one sentence philosophies behind other languages that we didn’t touch [...]

A while back I wrote about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  In a serendipitous coincidence, NPR ran a story recently that directly relates to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong.  While the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn’t mentioned, it clearly is involved.
The story touches on languages and how gender in languages affects thinking.  It is highlighted that [...]

Today’s title is a play off of Stuart Halloway’s current series of blog posts titled Java.next.  Stuart is focusing his series on the set of languages that run on the JVM and are looking to replace (or if not replace, then gain dominance alongside) Java.
In the third part of the series, Dispatch, Stuart writes about [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I think programming languages should have a REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop).
Unfortunately, PHP does not have one natively.  However, I just discovered that Facebook has opened sourced a REPL for PHP – so now you can test out your PHP code without needing to write and run a script.
Working in Python, I’ve found Python’s [...]

I’ll keep this insanity short and sweet.
In PHP, if you have a define that you forget to actually define, it will default to true, not false.
Why is this?  Because in evaluating the define, if PHP cannot find anything else to evaluate it to, it will evaluate it to a string literal, which always evaluates to [...]