“I like solving problems — I don’t like programming. It’s tedious,” said the creator of PHP on stage at our DevBeat conference.

A senior Google database expert loves the JIT compiler, but others doubt its worth and say it could be hard to maintain.

One thing you can say for PHP is that it’s persistent. Like many long-standing programming languages, it’s often maligned by developers who would like to see a shift to newer candidates, yet ...