Let's start with Hello World shall we? Here's the whole PHP program.

<?='Hello World'?>

18 CHARACTERS. PHP was a template engine long before anyone grafted 1,001 other crazy uses to it. In the job it was designed for - fulfilling HTML requests from webservers - few things can touch it for simplicity or development speed.

In fairness to Java, it scales better to large applications than PHP. PHP does little to discourage its largely newbie programmer base from making bad to outright catastrophic design choices. Java has its uses and it's place. It isn't a panacea though, not by a long shot.

So drop the Java fanboi act - it makes you look foolish. There are tasks which it is not the best tool for the job, or even close to the best tool.

Where does the line get drawn? Hell, an echo statement must look up the character code for each letter in the string and send that along to the graphics driver for further processing before even one letter is shown on the screen to the user.

The article demonstrated the language itself being able to present a solution to the traveling salesman in 2 lines of code. I personally find arguments about how many underlying function calls the language had to go to while it turned it's instructions into something the computer can understand to be useless asinine pendantry. It doesn't matter to the end user working in this language what goes on any more than it really matters to a video game programmer what exactly goes on in the GPU when a graphics call is made, or to a windows programmer exactly what the GUI must do to place the letters on the screen.

My first impression of this language and library is its a powerful new tool at a level of abstraction even further removed than current high level scripting languages like Javascript. In the field of data gathering and presentation - to which it seems to be aimed - it probably will find a lot of jobs to do. That doesn't mean other languages won't still have their place.

For example: people use PHP often because it can do in a couple lines what might take several pages of code to do in Java - and there are tasks that PHP needs several pages of code to do that Python can deal with in a few lines as well. That's the nature of programming languages. This is another tool to put in the tool case, and that's a good thing. I will admit that the article tries to write this up as a universal panacea, but I have my severe doubts on that. There's likely going to be certain tasks to which this language will prove to be poorly suited and need very long scripts to do that current languages can do fairly quickly.

That hardly debunks my point. Rather, it reinforces it - people choose languages on the basis of work getting done quickly - all other concerns go out the window pretty quickly.

Hello. My name is PHP. I'm the most ugly hideous language known to man, but man do I have thousands of functions to get work done. And that's why I rule the server side processing world :D

Function libraries and ability to get stuff done quickly counts for a lot.

Do you count the code that drives the compiler or interpreter as part of your program? What about the code that drives your database?? If it's abstracted away into the language then it's not "actual meat" as far as the programmer doing the work is concerned. It is two lines. And unless you're writing all your code in machine language you have no right to claim otherwise.

Sinkholes better than 100' wide are not unknown in that area. The largest cavern system in the world, Mammoth Cave, runs under that city and stretches out to the northeast.

The original 1611 printing, or the 1820's printing currently in most wide use?

As for the fallacy of such divisive faith - in 1611 there was one Anglican protestant church. Now there's well over 1,000 denominations due to squabbling over interpretations of the text and the sinful pride of "ministers" who will not submit to any authority at all. In that same time frame there still is only one Roman Catholic Church.

The difference? The true church does not subscribe to the heretical teaching of Martin Luther known as sola scriptura. Our faith is in God himself, not the idolatry of a book.

CGI stands for "Common Gateway Interface." It's not a programming language. Many web services are or at least can be run using this interface, such as PHP. While its true native webserver modules offer better performance, if you have a reason to write a webpage using C the like you'll most likely need to use CGI to do it.

In the future, when you go for the "funneh", try to know what you are talking about.

Braun should not be called out. Once you advance, the base is yours. The runner who was previously on the base (Segura) must advance to the next base before being tagged out. You are right about two runners not being allowed on the same base, however it is the lead runner who is to be called out when it happens. This is baseball 101, the sort of call little league umps like myself see all the time. I could give the major league umps some slack since pro players don't make such a rookie mistake hardly ever, but it still doesn't excuse the fact this is very basic rules knowledge in the game.

Incidently, once Braun takes second, Segura can be forced out by tagging the ball at third - no need to chase him down.

I'm amazed the major league umps missed this.

The umps are wrong. Each runner has an entitled base. They are only safe at that base, and no others... If the runner behind you takes your base, you must advance to the next to be safe, you aren't safe anywhere else..

The correct call, Seguro, not the runner from 1st, was out at second. The moment that runner touched 2nd base it was his, seguro's base became 3rd and he's out if tagged anywhere else on the field.

This is very, very clearly spelled out in the rules of baseball. You can't run backwards, it's against the rules, and whoever supervises the umpires needs to pull that entire team in for review and suspension for blowing a series of calls that severely.

How? I've read the descriptions - they all hinge on the principle that for something to exist it has to be observed. To me that's as stupid as a man claiming the sun doesn't exist when he can't see it in the sky.

First point - If we as a species perceived everything by sound I'm quite certain the same statements would be made by us regarding breaking the sound barrier. And yet, we have

Second point - Who was it that said that when an esteemed scientist tells you something is impossible, he is most likely wrong?

Final point - The arrogance of modern physicists never ceases to astound me. Compare what we know about the universe to what can be known, and I'm fairly certain you'll find that it would compare unfavorably to what the cavemen understood about the universe as compared to modern man.

Why is it so hard to say, "I don't know, let's find out?"