PHP has been around for a long time, and it’s starting to show its age. From top to bottom, the language has creaky joints. I’ve decided to take a look at how things got to this point, and what can be (and is being) done about it. I start out pretty gloomy, but bear with me; I promise it gets better.In the Beginning, There Was Apache and CGIAnd there was much rejoicing.In 1994, Rasmus Lerdorf created the “Personal Home Page Tools,” a set of CGI binaries written in C. These tools looked little-to-nothing like the PHP we know today. Embedded in HTML comments, and using ...

Every now and then I get a really lovely email from an aspiring letterer that is about to publish a passion project of his or her own. They tell me my work was an inspiration and that they can’t wait to share their creation with the world. I feel all warm and fuzzy inside for a moment…until I click on their link and realize that much of what they intend to publish is nearly a direct tracing of my work.A lot of established illustrators and designers deal with the same thing—students or young professionals that rip them off without realizing it. Addressing these young d...

Mobile phones have come a long way since the unsightly bricks of the 1980s. The sleek handsets of today are a fraction the size of their ancestors, yet exponentially more powerful. While the implications for communication have been profound, there have been many other applications for this technology. Modern devices are capable of supporting increasingly complex software, innovative interfaces and networking capabilities, and the gaming sector has been one of the biggest benefactors of this.Much has changed since the monochrome titles of early Nokia models. One only need look at some...

This post is part of our ReadWriteHack channel, which is a resource and guide for developers. The channel is sponsored by the Intel AppUp Developer Program. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: AIR for AppUp: What You Need To Know Rackspace recently published a nice infographic on the evolution of programming languages. It starts with FORTRAN and COBOL and runs through Ruby on Rails (which, yes, is a framework and not a language). Unfortunately, it omits such influential languages as  Lisp,  ALGOL 60 and  Smalltalk. But inclu...