i wasn’t at @media but it’s a shame people feel the need to carry on PHP bashing. Rails is great and has got a lot of people into decent web dev techniques, but PHP is a powerful, mature language which I would expect most serious web programmers take very seriously.

Of course part of PHP’s current unpopularity (or is “uncoolness” a better term?) is that a lot of people simply code PHP badly and there’s so much bad PHP out there on the web. The fact PHP just lets you get on with it quickly is both powerful and dangerous. It puts the onus on the developer to do things properly.

As Philip notes there is little best practise direction on the PHP.net website and it’s only recently with web frameworks like Zend Framework (http://framework.zend.com/) that “doing things properly” has been shouted about.

PHP is likely to get a better reputation once PHP 6 is out, with full unicode support and the ditching of a lot of unhelpful features like register_globals.

Conferences are great places to learn and meet people, but the trend is often on “cool” stuff which can be completely at odds with the reality of the “real” business world of the web. It would be nice for a bit more grounding in reality sometimes..