On Thursday morning, Rasmus Lerdorf (now working at Yahoo) gave the opening keynote. (Expect it to appear here someday.) He covered physics, rocket science, the web problem, and a little bit of PHP along the way. One of his main points was that the web problem isn't fundamentally difficult. Unlike complex web software from various commercial vendors, PHP provides the basic tools to need to build solutions to "the web problem" without feeling like you need a degree in rocket science to get started.
There was a bit of discussion about changes to the language in PHP 4.3 and/or 5.0. The one point that came up repeatedly is that PHP will create references to object by default, rather than copying them. That may break some existing code, but it'll do What Everyone Already Expects so it's a Good Thing.
Posted by jzawodn at October 28, 2002 02:51 PM
Ugh, I hope that's a 5.0 thing and not a 4.3 thing. I'm really sick of subtle breakage during relatively small PHP upgrades. This one will be hard to go back and find all the instances where it breaks, too. Sigh. :-)