Although this announcement was made last year, I did not catch it until today on darknet. This is sad news, and in my opinion, a big blow to PHP’s developer’s community. There are other efforts out there trying to improve PHP’s inherently weaker security model, such as the new PHPSec.org and the hardened-php folks. For those of you who know me well, you know that although I use PHP, I am not a huge fan of it. For some reason, some people argue that this is an easy language to pick up for beginners. I can only guess that it is because PHP is very “graphical” and users can generate web pages with ease. But as far as a language goes, I would think that python is a much easier language to pick up for beginners.