Fascinating study of building a neural network with PHP if you’re looking for an absorbing Sunday read...

Via Perfectionism: Coding an artificial neural network (ANN) in PHP.

Thanks to the author for taking time to explain well. Aside from the discussion itself one comment of note...

“Choice of Language: I chose to develop in PHP to take advantage of its diversity of vector manipulation functions and a shorter coding-debugging lifecycle while in the process of learning the algorithms thanks to the interpreted nature of PHP scripts.”

Which leads me to a minor rant. While reading O’Reilly’s recent interview with Guido van Rossum, on page 2;

“ORN: Why do you think Python is less popular than Perl? GvR: Perl was there first. It’s definitely older than Python, and when I decided to create Python I looked at the existing Perl, which I think was 3.0. Even by that time it had managed to create a lot of mind share, and it definitely filled a need in the user community. Perl, Python, Ruby and Tcl are the four dynamic programming languages that get the most publicity as open source projects, and I think they have a lot more in common than they differ.

Spot the omission. Now I like Python but from where I stand, in order of “popularity”, PHP is second only to Perl. A finger in the air search on Jobserve will give you a clue to which out of Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl are actually being used.

So either Guido simply forgot or he thinks PHP isn’t a programming language.