Ok, it’s time to let the people of #java on Ef-net let us know what they thought of PHP in the period from July to December 2005 (read: yes, I’ve done a grep -iH “php is” on my #java irclogs). Of course, we all know the PHP developers had strong opinions on Java, so this will be interesting. < @Tenchi> php is terd < @aut> straight php is faster than using php to transform xml < waz> don’t forget “PHP is slow!

Welcome to my new column. It’s basically a grep of all mentions of java in #php from July to December 2005. The nicks have not been hidden to protect the guilty. This is what the people in #php on ef-net think about Java as a programming language: < Johnboyo> java is awful, im a symbian programmer by trade and i avoid it at all costs < @feti> better than a low-level language.

Most of the time I’m pretty proud to call myself a Java programmer. When people ask me what programming language I work with, I usually answer Java even though I’ve probably been doing more PHP5 than Java lately. But every now and then I get a question from a client asking where he or she should download the latest version of the Java runtime. I wish I could offer them something else than java.