8 votes

PHP in 2019

Tags: php, coding

6 comments

  1. cptcobalt
    Link
    I am all-in on PHP. I find it quite effortless to write highly scalable, simple, and performant tools using PHP. Granted, I build tools for internal audiences most often, but PHP has never served...

    I am all-in on PHP. I find it quite effortless to write highly scalable, simple, and performant tools using PHP. Granted, I build tools for internal audiences most often, but PHP has never served me wrong.

    PHP is modern too—this post tries to defend it. Perhaps it's not the latest and greatest, but the language gets routine updates and features—if you haven't developed on the 7.* era (let alone 7.3) then your opinion of PHP is too dated. It's simple, proven, sensical, and it works. I'm not ready to leave it behind for, say, Javascript.

    4 votes
  2. [5]
    unknown user
    Link
    Why? I mean why? Why just don't let it die? Or, to phrase it more positively, what advantage does it still pose that a million other choices lack? At best, it has become almost as good as Django...

    Why?

    I mean why? Why just don't let it die? Or, to phrase it more positively, what advantage does it still pose that a million other choices lack? At best, it has become almost as good as Django or Rails or <name your thing here>.

    For modern stuff you will need a modern setup anyways, PHP isn't cheaper on Heroku or DigitalOcean. Guess the only benefit to this is that there are programmers in certain parts of the world that will code you something up for peanuts.

    2 votes
    1. unknown user
      Link Parent
      Because language diversity is a positive thing. I don't use it very often, but I find writing PHP quite fun, actually. What does "For modern stuff you will need a modern setup anyways" mean?...

      Because language diversity is a positive thing. I don't use it very often, but I find writing PHP quite fun, actually. What does "For modern stuff you will need a modern setup anyways" mean? What's modern mean?

      PHP isn't cheaper on Heroku or DigitalOcean

      I don't think any language is cheaper than any other, what is this comparison?

      5 votes
    2. Akir
      Link Parent
      I'm not really involved with any PHP projects for quite a while, but PHP always had a really great community. The documentation has always been very well written, and when you had a problem it...

      I'm not really involved with any PHP projects for quite a while, but PHP always had a really great community. The documentation has always been very well written, and when you had a problem it seemed like there was always someone willing to help you out regardless of which framework or application you were working with.

      Other languages feature communities that are typically highly fragmented and hierarchical. The 'atmosphere' can be vastly different depending on which framework you're working with.

      At best, it has become almost as good as Django or Rails or <name your thing here>.

      You're thinking in the wrong terms. Those are frameworks, whereas PHP is a language. The predominant framework, Laravel, has been often described to me as "like writing poetry", so I would venture to guess that most PHP users think it's much better than Django or Rails.

      Beyond all that, there is a whole shipload of services that are written on PHP, and refactoring to new versions of the language make much more sense than rewriting everything in a new language and with a new framework.

      2 votes
    3. [2]
      umbrae
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      I vastly prefer python but have worked in a couple large PHP deployments now (Etsy, Mailchimp) and have some fair pragmatic reasoning: It is very well understood and extremely simple for folks to...

      I vastly prefer python but have worked in a couple large PHP deployments now (Etsy, Mailchimp) and have some fair pragmatic reasoning:

      1. It is very well understood and extremely simple for folks to get ramped up on. Probably easier than Django. I had someone transfer from ruby a couple months ago and become productive in literally a week. When your codebase is already huge for business logic reasons having well understood underpinnings is useful.
      2. It has request isolation which definitely has tradeoffs but lends itself well to monoliths. It’s good for avoiding state between requests and concurrency.
      3. Not having to restart the server in dev whenever you make edits is nice.

      There’s definitely a lot to prefer about other languages so I’m not saying it’s a choice I would make 95% of the time if I were starting fresh, really, but there are some benefits.

      2 votes
      1. unknown user
        Link Parent
        Isn't 2 and 3 more about (Fast)CGI rather than PHP?

        Isn't 2 and 3 more about (Fast)CGI rather than PHP?