While living in Charlottesville, we always made fun of the UVa Hospital displaying a huge banner that said something like “Among the top 100 U.S. hospitals.” Our standard joke was that they were probably number 99.

This morning, after starting up my computer, I noticed that there was a lot of “chatter” about the Top 100 Language Blogs 2009. I checked it out, and how could I have missed it? Grammar Girl is there, and Languagehat, Wishydig, and many others you can find in my blogroll. It was great to see so many familiar blogs. Congratulations to all! When I started in 2003, there was only a very small number of language bloggers. What an evolution.

Oh yes, and then there is this here blog at number 89! How did that happen? Well, nevermind how it happened, thank you all. I’m speechless. And UVa Hospital: I take it all back.

This made the list: Final Destination. Reason given:

Do you think an airline would ever show a film featuring a passenger plane exploding in mid-air? Well, did you ever think an airline would charge passengers to carry on hand luggage?

There are 13 others in the list, but this here is a funny reason. I usually bring my own movies/TV shows on my iPod. Cannot stand the way they butcher airplane movies in that process called editing for content.

The Google search of the week (wait, it is only Thursday; somebody could still top this): translate my name to kiwi. What were they hoping to find?

Let’s look at a different kind of language – not Indo-European or of lesser diffusion, but the one without which this blog would be dead as a doornail. You guessed it: PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP is a general-purpose scripting language for dynamic web pages and, according to Wikipedia, installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.

The pages of this blog do not exist on the server the way you see them in your browser. Instead, they consist of a bunch of PHP scripts that are activated by the page request of the browser. The scripts, working server-side, combine content from other files or databases with HTML and CSS information and output a web page that is displayed in your browser window.

For example, the code to insert the body copy of this post looks like this:

<?php if ( is_home() ){ ?>
<?php the_content(__('more...','avenue')); ?>
<?php } ?>

Scripting languages are tightly regulated by rules that govern operators, variables, syntax, and much more. In addition, they have to be logical. Steps that break logic can lead to loops that never resolve. With version 5.3, PHP seems to be changing course and is introducing a GOTO operator, which we all know so well from procedural languages.

GOTO in object-oriented PHP 5? What could go wrong?

Click image to embiggen. [From xkcd.com/292/]