This is the first in a of series of tongue-in-cheek interviews with the speakers at the upcoming PHPCon East 2003. Meant as a way for attendees to get to know the technical session presenters a bit better and, as such, should be short on ground-shaking revelations.

Interviews were conducted via email by php|architect and PHPCon. John Coggeshall responds,

When was your first PHP?

John Coggeshall: Sitting in a darkened smoke filled room... I was almost out of money but a friend of mine told me she [PHP] was good for a trick or two and didn't charge much.

If php was a cartoon character, what kind of cartoon character do you think it would be and why?

JC: Dexter from Dexter's Lab.

Do you think there could ever be a PHP-VB project, similar to PHP-GTK, without open sourcers declaring a holy war on VB-ers?

JC: You weren't supposed to know about that.. Who told you..

What area of PHP are you *least* enamored with and why?

JC: Most everything between when someone thinks of an idea, and when the users actually see it. Politics... It's not all bad, I just rather get hit by a truck.

What one thing would you like to see addressed by PHP that there is currently no initiative for?

JC: It's never a matter of lack of initiatives, because when it comes to PHP there is plenty of initiatives. (See my truck comment)

In the realm of PHP, what do you think most lacks clear, complete documentation?

JC: It's not a matter of documentation, it's just a matter of current documentation. The Doc guys/gals do the best job they can, but when you compare the docs to the actual PHP source unfortunately things don't always add up.

Do you think PHP usage would grow faster if it had a really sexy anime mascot or something other than the PHP cough drop?

JC: Cough drop? That's really funny... I never heard that before... I think PHP usage would grow if we could attract more women... Perhaps give it a Martha Stewart look and feel? People would sign on to the mailing lists and talk about PHP trying to hit on the women, and history has proven that's always an effective marketing tool.

If you could do away with an entire class of PHP functions, what would you get rid of?

JC: String manipulation functions. I think there is somewhere around 50 of them and a few of them are just silly and repetitive... Come on, how many different ways do you really need to be able to trim the white space on a string? Better yet, how many different versions of substr do you really need?

If you could compare PERL to a plate of leftover 'something' what would that 'something' be?

JC: I made a very strong effort to avoid perl as much as I could, and so far I've been very successful. If I had to make a comparison, I'd probably say asparagus.. Some people like it, some people really hate it but it really just depends on how its prepared.

What would happen if you mixed a dose of PHP with a cup of Java?

JC: You'd wake up with a bad hangover smelling like cough drops and tasting like coffee. But like all of the rest of them you'd go out and do it again the next night.

I remember using PHP when you couldn't even...

JC: I remember when you couldn't even use foreach(), does that count? Or how about when the echo statement behaved more like printf?

When was the last time you said, "You can't do that with PHP."?

JC: Heh. When someone came to me asking about how to make a living programming?

PHPCon would like to thank John Coggeshall for his enlightening answers. We would also like to thank php|architect for all their help in conducting the interviews.

Ask John, and the other presenters, your own questions at PHPCon East 2003.

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