PHP vs Python vs Ruby: Detailed Comparison compares the three popular languages in a variety of categories, such as total market share, large website deployments, usability, learning curve, popularity, performance, etc. Â It’s a nice overview if you are about to pick one of these languages for the future projects, or if you are (like me) have been stuck with one of them for a long time, and haven’t really kept an eye on what’s going on in the rest of the world.
This year I’ll be migrating quite a bit of stuff from PHP 5 to PHP 7. Â We haven’t started with the process yet, but with the recent indicators like PHPUnit 6 release, I’m sure the priority of this work will start rising.
Obviously, I’m familiar with the new features of PHP 7 and some of the things that will have to be done in order to port the applications and make use of the new version. Â But it still helps reading through articles like “Migrating a PHP 5 App to PHP 7 “, which comes in two parts:
Composer is great as it is. Â It’s even greater with all those plugins that people have created for it. Â But for when I’ll need to write my own, I’m sure I’ll find this blog post quite handy – “A Composer plugin development environment“.
Trust in Automation is by far the best thing I’ve read on the subjects of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and their affects on human society.  There are plenty of links and quotes that make you think and want you to learn more … until you don’t.  It’s not depressing, but it is quite concerning.  Here are a couple of quotes from the article (some of them are quotes of other people), which I liked:
As the cost of labor goes up and the cost of machinery goes down, at some point, it’ll be cheaper to use machines than people. With the increase in productivity, the GDP goes up, but so does unemployment. What do you do? … The best way is to reduce the time a certain portion of the population spends living, and then find ways to keep them busy.
—Jingfang Hao, Folding Beijing (2014)
Also this one:
If you think discrimination is bad today, just wait until the machines take over. They will discriminate based on the the shade of your iris, the shape of your brow, the size of a tatoo, or any arbitrary collection of low-level traits whose presence triggers a subtle bias.
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