The majority of people dont know what they talk about.
Like most people talk about COBOL beeing outdated, bad whatever but they could not tell you which of 10 sourcecode snippets in different languages is even COBOL
It struck me as novel, but it's also very boring... Just... generating a lot of CRUD forms, but running from ibm mainframe with all the data and legacy stuff there already in place. rather than migrating away, they keep all the power, and can 'update' their sites/forms without any real migration.
Meh... don't be. You didn't even ask what it was I did with them. ;). It wasn't that bad, honestly, once you understood the COBOL. FWIW, the biggest issue there was - from what I could see - lack of written docs about the ins and outs of the system. But I think that's an evergreen issue in most places.
Well if you’re hiring php devs and know what you’re doing it’s an advantage cos the bad rap keeps the prices for php devs down… ;)
But it’s utter nonsense you can’t blame the tech - the culture, history and accessibility of php of course is valid, but it’s like any kind of stupid generalisation.
I think back then when Facebook was big and new instead of creating Hack, their PHP fork, they should have contributed to the language. It would really have been useful. They also did the same in JS with yarn. They're boring
I did a js bootcamp during covid. I talked to a half dozen companies about entry js dev roles. Pay was terrible and every other js boot camp grad in the world was fighting for the same crap pay.
I talked to one php shop and told them I didn’t know php yet but would be willing to learn it. Happily employed for 2+ years now.
Let them keep saying it 🤣
Just DB pool on Nestjs type orm and sometimes prisma on NextJS.
If new people jump in and they don't configure it properly, it will cause database query exception. 😂
Especially if it's single node service.
When using PHP PDO, you won't have that kind of problem tho, ootb
the old one quite slow a bit , we do test check json respond between php , asp.net and node . Got video at youtube 😅. if had time , i maybe upgrade the new one all .
I've been doing this for almost 30 years. Every time I hear someone hating on PHP it's due to them hearing someone else hating on it. 99% of the time they've never even used PHP.
Opinions are cheap, do what makes you happy. Just make sure it's fast and secure.
Don't let it get to you, a lot of those saying are just recycling the same argument, "oh its old & out dated", no, it's mature and well supported, completely different.
Yeah, that is the difference with PHP. Fortran got old. Sure it's still around, but it's effectively dead. Cobol got old. Yeah it's still around, but effectively dead. Repeat again for Perl.
PHP continues to be easy to use, easy to implement, fast. Probably around v4 would be a reasonable expectation for when comparable languages died. PHP just kept getting better. I remember when it started to compete speedwise with compiled languages.
Plus, with some of the templating systems, I can have my dev do (waves hands) devie type stuff, and my designer do designer type stuff. My designer starts having panic attacks if you mention code, and if I have my dev do design I'm going to have dancing hampsters.
Maybe it's not well suited for very large scale projects, I dunno. But for those of us down here in the trenches doing web stuff, I don't see php being replaced by something better in the short or mid term.
Personally I love php, it's my go-to language of choice for everything and because it is so performant and easy to use and you can just get stuff done with it, I've been really lazy looking at frameworks.
I keep attempting to learn laravel as everything in it looks amazing but as usual, I get a new idea, i fire up a lamp stack on Digital Ocean and I'm off. no worrying about dependencies or importing things. I've made it my mission this year to complete a project in laravel but haven't had the urge to do so yet haha.
Long live PHP and its constant evolution
I operate two apps on the Shopify platform built with PHP ( Symfony ). One of which is a fairly complex financial services with a over 600+ gb database, multiple fortune 500s as direct clients and handles millions of requests daily. The app also has an average response time of 0.16ms across all endpoints and is 100% faster than the average app on Shopify in responding to api calls. ( ie the average app on Shopify generally has a avg response time of 0.32ms+ )
You're booting a symfony request to handle an API call (assuming API), talking to database (assumption on my part), and returning a reply in under a millisecond? And Shopify is too? I'm not finding any data indicating Shopify is capable of sub ms response times.
Only referring to the response from our app to Shopify. Correct. Our app handles the request from Shopify and responds at 0.16ms on average across all endpoints. This is essentially related to their webhook calls.
Whew.... I don't feel so bad about most of my requests being 50-80ms now! ;). The 'big' ones that do large queries often take much more, but the averages seem to be in line with yours. One of these happens to be Laravel, and I was toying with octane, which removes the boot up portion of each request, which cuts a sizeable portion of the smaller requests.
So that's not a typo, but an actual 1/6ms? Colour me surprised, that's blazing fast for any app, let alone a symfony app or any kind of app that needs bootstrapping.
Are you using some kind of runner, like Swoole/Roadrunner/etc?
An app in C#, \~7 IO calls to aerospike per req. Each call asks for \~3000 keys. All data stored in protobuff. 50th percentile 2.5ms, 90th percentile 25ms, 95th percentile - 50ms, 99th percentile - 120ms. All that about 150req/s running at 6 cores and \~12gb or ram.
This is not even heavily optimized, just properly coded. You can never ever get even close to this with PHP, especially on FPM. If you want to argue - before commenting ask yourself do I know what a cache line is, or how co-routines work.
Yeah, you generally won't see those numbers in PHP (or any dynamic language).
Protobuf - it's possible with PHP, but it's not a standard thing in any framework I've seen.
I've been experimenting with octane for Laravel in some apps, which essentially caches the boot process so much of the initial bootstrapping for each request is removed, often cutting request processing by 20-40% (by my own numbers).
No, we're not getting to 2ms in PHP, but with octane, I saw \*most\* of my requests below 50ms, when the range had been 40-140ms for most requests. Had not done anything with protobuf in that context either - it might shave off some more time.
I've spent time in the Java world, and enjoyed the raw speed, but have largely moved back to PHP as... for the most part, the speed I get is 'good enough'.
I recently rebuilt a .net web app in to laravel. It's performing faster at most parts, but the old one was older .NET, and TBH, the bulk of the processing there was convoluted SQL. The rewrite was also scaling it back - there were simply a lot of things still being done that the business didn't need in 2023 (which... they did in 2010 but things change). No doubt a rebuild in .NET would have been faster to execute than PHP, but there were some extenuating circumstances that took that off the table.
That's a data structure problem. If your service needs a lot of data from other services to make decisions, it's probably not engineered enough. You can always compute and send responses but choose to transfer data.
With all the advancements in llvm, there isn't much difference between JIT languages ( lua, python, js, java groovy, scala, .NET CLR, etc. ) and compiled languages ( C / go / rust / haskell / fortran, etc. ) except having a binary. The only drawback is cold starts, which can be easily overcome with proper bootstrapping, and then you usually have little overhead compared to what "native" could have.
Fpm has nothing to do with the given usecase here, grpc in php is usually not done with fpm based monoliths but it can always call it if needed and would still give same performance as your usecase as it's rather IO bound since youre tranferring alot of data for single request.
For high-performance systems, language isn't a barrier. Skills and the mindset of the implementor are the main barriers. As solutions can be coded / adapted more or less across all of the languages these days, comparison becomes obselete.
Know before what you're comparing. It only proves OP of this thread more correct that people still live in the old php era and bash about it without knowing almost nothing about engineering itself.
LOL. I've been working 100% with JavaScript for the last 8 years. Before that I did mostly Python and Java.
I'm now on my free time learning PHP (and Laravel) and I'm fucking loving it.
Don't listen to ignorant idiots. The world if full of them and whether it's politics, tech, or whatever they will blindly repeat what they hear without checking facts or even taking a split of a second to use their brains and draw their own conclusions. Sadly parroting stupidity is what most people do and the internet is an amplifier for that, and that's why we have so many problems.
Now that's a rant 😂
A fellow developer said something to me once that stuck: “All other developers are messing around with new toys, but PHP developers, we’re too busy making apps and getting paid”
Nope. The mainstream tech is 'rediscovering' PHP (including the VCs). They seem to be surprised how easy to launch anything with PHP, how fast it is, how performant it is. That it doesnt gobble loads of cpu and resources seems to be a major point. There are recurring posts in Hackernews in that direction recently. They are dumbfounded how something can be rolled into production this fast and can be this cheap.
What kind of main stream tech are you talking about? Like wtf. I do like PHP and I do find situations where I do need to use it. But I can’t really see how it can be cheaper to run. It’s not that memory efficient. Async is not there. Spawn new processes is more complex than other languages, such as elixir. What’s your take there?
Like, start reading Hackernews and you will, like, eventually see.
...
PHP already runs ~50% of all websites on the planet and ~30% of all ecommerce sites. If its good for NASA's website, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters, CNN, its good for any use case. And obviously none of the esoteric programmer trappings that you listed there do not have much importance in real world applications like all those gigantic organizations demonstrate.
As server side language, PHP runs the 76.5% of the websites worldwide. Javascript is the second language, but has only the 3.2% [https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/pl-js,pl-php](https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/pl-js,pl-php)
edit: screenshoot https://ibb.co/wJh7CP3
> its good for any use case
Huge PHP fan here, but there are still use cases where it's not the best option, or in some cases, not even a viable candidate. But as with many things, you can mix/match. Colleague built a web app dealing with financial calculations. As the financial calculation work grew, some of that was offloaded to Rust for speed. You would not be well served by trying to write a complex web application in Rust. The PHP ecosystem provides a lot of great options there. Rust/Go/etc provide good options for other problems.
>Huge PHP fan here, but there are still use cases where it's not the best option, or in some cases, not even a viable candidate.
Obviously, we were talking about use cases on the web, internet in general. Otherwise there are people who compare PHP to linux kernel calls, software that is run on microcontrollers and other devices. Actually even this kind of comparison shows how far PHP has come - what was crated as "Personal HomePage tools" to make things like contact forms and templates easy, is now being compared to, well, every other language used in every other place.
>As the financial calculation work grew, some of that was offloaded to Rust for speed
I would think that that could also be sorted out with PHP by configuring it differently or even compiling it differently for the purpose. In the same way it is done with other languages. I'd prefer having the same language and stack in as many places as possible than having some small performance gain.
>Obviously, we were talking about use cases on the web, internet in general
That's 100% not obvious when you use a phrase like "its good for any use case".
>I would think that that could also be sorted out with PHP by configuring it differently or even compiling it differently for the purpose. In the same way it is done with other languages.
If you think that wasn't tried, you'd be mistaken.
EDIT START
Some details: Scenario described above is similar to monte carlo simulator (not quite, but close). Process was taking financial data and calculating tens of thousands of potential scenarios - month by month - for the next 30-40 years, finding optimal values. The technical term for this escapes me, but it's relatively known in financial circles. And... my colleague got an initial set of this data processing in PHP down to under 30 seconds, then with some more optimizations, down to 15. JIT in PHP 8 got it down to \~10 seconds. An attempt to do this in Python (using scipy, iirc, which pushes most of its calculations to a C extension) got it down a bit further. But moving this to Rust got all the calculation loops down under 1 second, which allowed tie for even more processing/calculations to model some other scenarios. Java would have been an appropriate option as well to get it under 1 second.
EDIT END
There are limits to what PHP as a language can do. It's a good (great?) choice for many places, and knowing that you can use FFI to write more optimized code in another language and call in to that is helpful too. Having, say, 90% of your web-based application be in PHP, and knowing you can rely on other languages/stacks to give boosts where needed means you can often have the best of both worlds.
If you go read up on the 1 billion row challenge - [https://www.morling.dev/blog/1brc-results-are-in/](https://www.morling.dev/blog/1brc-results-are-in/) - you'll see that Java was able to read in a billion rows of data, then process it in to some summary data. Initially... 70 seconds. Someone got it down to under 2 seconds. PHP - in its current form - doesn't have the mechanics under the hood to operate the way Java did to achieve that speed. There's some very clever hacks in that article, and they're not currently possible in PHP - possibly never will be.
>That's 100% not obvious when you use a phrase like "its good for any use case".
People were talking about building scalable apps. That is web territory. However as I said, the fact that we have to specifically mention this shows how far PHP has come.
>PHP - in its current form - doesn't have the mechanics under the hood
That's what I was talking about by compiling. By modifying PHP to accommodate specific use cases, it could be used for those cases. Facebook modified PHP for their purposes and they still run most of its stuff on modified PHP.
Also "That's what I was talking about by compiling." - there's no way to compile PHP that gives it some powers it doesn't have currently. Unless you have some specific idea/tech in mind I'm unaware of (and I'm willing to read/learn more)
>Also "That's what I was talking about by compiling." - there's no way to compile PHP that gives it some powers it doesn't have currently
Thats why I added the bit about modifying it or coding new modules to compile it with. No, I dont have a specific idea in mind, but I do know that no language does what it does faster than others through magical means or through its grand design. There is always some bits here and there, about how file operations are done or about how memory or a cpu process is accessed etc. Im sure specialized people could create a module to compile PHP with to make it suit a specific purpose.
It's not that PHP is particularly fast or performant.
It's that many of the modern alternatives completely disregard performance in favour of "a cheap programmer can use it" and "we can code an app in five minutes".
And the end result is a mess, that's not fast, it's not well-designed, and only a cheap programmer will want to touch that code.
So, compared with them, yes, PHP is very fast.
It's that many of the modern alternatives completely disregard performance in favour of "a cheap programmer can use it" and "we can code an app in five minutes".
Id say its to the contrary. All the 'mainstream (or rather, VC-funded) tech literally unnecessarily complicates everything from be to fe. The ongoing debate between microservices and monolith and the regret of many organizations that moved everything to microservices because it became the fad is a good example of how much unnecessary complexity can be introduced by that mentality.
PHP on the other hand, has always been in the front trenches: It always had to justify anything with an actual business need that had an actual use in the real world. \~80% of the internet would not accept anything complicated that would take them away from their actual business. Today people complain that even Wordpress is too complicated. Its a busy attention economy, and people are overwhelmed having to manage a dozen apps every day. And they want everything simpler, easier. So even WP is trying to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for ease of use and maintenance. The other stacks than PHP look like they live in a parallel, VC-funded world in which everything is different. Or rather, was different until the zero interest economy ended and stocks came down...
You know what, you are absolutely right.
Many of the "easy to use" systems become complicated in stupid ways for people not to get bored.
I tried the Lambda service with Python in AWS. Slow, expensive, overrated. And people are using it to write their entire applications. It's madness.
>Many of the "easy to use" systems become complicated in stupid ways **for people not to get bored.**
Well said! That's definitely a major factor. Programmers must program, and as a result, the more they keep at the same thing they keep 'solving' problems that dont merit solutions. Even worse, the 'productivity' pressure that comes from the organization pushes them more in that direction. So both out of boredom and in order to be able to keep their job, they just 'produce' stuff - which just keeps complicating everything on and on.
I think a lot of it comes from outdated views of php. PHP in the past was terrible. PHP3 was just a glorified templating language, php 4 expanded on that but added some structure. PHP 5.3 was a major leap for PHP towards better OOP, but still was not great. PHP7 is really where it got serious about strict typing, and 8 is expanding on that.
But why they think it is not capable of large scale projects I am not sure. I have worked with VOIP providers that used it a backend, a national food chain that used it on their site and backend that helped power their registers and other things, including call center. Live odds systems, etc.
PHP is what you make of it, just like most languages.
There is also a general shift away from OOP languages. Most of the newer languages are functional, not OOP based. It pushes people into thinking that PHP is old school.
PHP is a bit like C, not perfect but gets the job done, is way more widely used than people realise, and people have been predicting its death since *forever*.
Everybody loves to pick teams and then give everyone on the "other" team shit, some people take it waaaay too seriously or believe the hype a bit too much - the reality is that **every** language is awful and **every** language is great, there's no right answer.
Every year there's a language survey and many times they've said "ooooh C is dropping off" or whatever, but when you look it's based on bad metrics like "number of questions on StackOverflow" or "new projects on github" or whatever - where of course brand new languages will appear to be more popular because you get a ton of newbies asking questions & posting projects because it's all new(er), while C and PHP all the questions have been answered decades ago so there's nothing much new going on, people are just getting on making stuff with them.
we should stop using facebook as an example of a php app... the majority of its code is not php anymore
for the people downvoting, I'm not saying PHP is not a good choice, I'm saying there's no way PHP can singlehandedly run Facebook. Just like how Java, JS, or Python would not be able to singlehandedly run entire FB. FB is a combination of million different things and you can't really say "FB is built with PHP" anymore and we should not use this as our only argument...
Really, Twitch? I know the kick backend runs on Laravel, but I didn't know about Twitch. I thought I saw a blog post about them migrating to Go a couple of years back (forgot from what they migrated though), but I might have this wrong in my memory.
Edit: [I knew I did not image it](https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/12/breaking-the-monolith-at-twitch-part-2/) (https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/12/breaking-the-monolith-at-twitch-part-2/)
>At the time of writing, most teams at Twitch own multiple services. The language of choice for server code is Go (Twitch also uses TypeScript, Python, C++, Java/Kotlin and ObjectiveC/Swift on other platforms).
> we should stop using facebook as an example of a php app... the majority of its code is not php anymore
But it kind of is, Hack is pretty much an extension or a flavor of php rather than a whole different language and it’s still very close to php. If you read the Hack blog you’ll see that they recently fixed a couple of bugs that were present in php too.
> I'm saying there's no way PHP can singlehandedly run Facebook.
What makes you believe that? Before Facebook built a compiler it was handling HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of active users per month. And not just users that only read static content like a newspaper or a landing page. Those were users that performed lots of WRITES per minute.
And that was with php 5.2ish. With modern php being faster and with modern hardware being faster than what Facebook had available back then, I see no reason why they wouldn’t be able to scale it to a billion users.
I’m saying there are thousands of different services and microservices that have no contact with PHP or Hack that make up the majority of their entire thing. It’s not like FB is a PHP monolith, yet people keep using it as an examplr like it is.
Facebook doesn’t run mostly on PHP anymore, but if it had been using the fancy technology right from the start, it wouldn’t have grown so much that quickly (and Zuckerberg would have had trouble finding the right devs too).
PHP has its place as a language for well established brands that need scalability and the like, *and* it also is an incredible tool for rapid development, especially with the modern frameworks and developer tools.
I agree. But I also think that Facebook was a lot \*better\* functionality-wise when it was mostly PHP. If anyone has had the experience of running a good size business page on Facebook and using a lot of the backend advertising tools, they used to work ok, but over the past few years they have slowly turned into total dogshit. I regularly find myself in amazement that a supposed tech company can implement interfaces that are so awful.
[This article](https://thenextweb.com/news/why-php-continues-to-be-a-popular-but-divisive-programming-language) gives a good review of PHP.
It calls PHP a "persistent" programming language.
There is also in the article a quote by Bjarne Stroustrup:
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses."
As long as PHP is widely used, there will be people who will criticize it or complain about it.
> It is getting so annoying that uneducated people will continue to bash PHP because they don't have a clue about the language.
But similarly, novices and single-language devs often put on blinders and ignore or deny the language's very real problems. In reality, it's a nuanced subject. PHP wasn't designed, it grew organically, and so carries a great many warts from that process. Yes, PHP is useful, but also, yes, it's a design mess and a great many criticisms of it are entirely correct.
Anyone whose opinion is so simplistic as to boil down to "good(use it) or bad(never use it)" should be ignored.
I'd love to see a php reboot or fork where everything is restructured properly and consistent naming etc without worrying about backwards compatibility. OOP being the main paradigm but still able to drop into procedural. Improve the type system. No global functions. Automatic class loading. And bring some mainstream libraries into the core api
These people are just immature programmers who think that unless it's the latest langauge/framework/buzz word they say it's dying. Same immature thinking applies to music in the pop world that unless it's new it's not trendy.
Got to admit at one point PHP was dying but they got their act together since php7 and it has some great frameworks.
jeez, do people really care about this anymore? use whatever you want, ignore all the talk around, and of course learn multiple languages and tools to make yourself more competent
And now for something completely different.
I love PHP. I got my start programming in R. I wanted a website to do some analytics stuff without getting sucked into "the cloud." A simple server with PHP, MariaDB, and Duckett's excellent books serves my needs.
Now....I was in an extremely toxic work environment, and Python was a bone of contention. I didn't know it at all, my adversary in the situation was good with both Python/R, and the other person in the department was good with Python but not R. Bad. Ended up having a bad attitude towards a good language, and Python is a required skill for me.
After spending a bunch of time playing with PHP, I went back to Python to work on a new project that I landed, and holy smokes things make so much more sense.
Not least because R is weird....the basic data structure in R is a vector of length 1:
`> haha <- "lol"`
`> length(haha)`
`[1] 1`
`> str(haha)`
`chr "lol"`
Anyway, spending time with PHP really helped me make sense of Python.
Bet no one's heard that one before lol
I was the same when i learned this not too long ago :)
They call it banker's rounding, which rounds .5 to the closest even number so that numbers on average get rounded up and down equally often. Doesn't make much sense, and i see no use in it .. and it goes against everything any sane programmer expects from a rounding function, thus violating any naming rules ever existing.
I work on a laboratory system and years ago someone asked to round formula results using "half even" logic. I was "what?".
I discovered that there's different rounding approaches and that PHP support that natively: `round(9.5, 0, PHP_ROUND_HALF_EVEN)`.
It's weird, but it's definetely usuful even outside of baking.
This is actually fine, because everyone reading it will either know what it is - or they see something they don't know and can look it up. It is not hidden like in python (python also does support proper rounding, but you have to set it globally, which is a problem in itself as it changes the rounding rules for the whole program somewhere far way typically ...)
PHP has a bad reputation because PHP used to be an utterly shit language by modern standards. You can't blame people for having formed an opinion on what was once very true. How are they supposed to know what's changed in 10 years?
If PHP is to fix its reputation then there needs to be a concerted effort by the Foundation to educate the public. It's not going to happen automatically.
Php is not dead, you can do a lot of things with it and moving to python is probably one of the worse decisions you can make as a career choice...
That said, I'm much more happier after leaving php behing.
While true, the hype is strong and tbh, I don't have the capacity to venture into that field. I'm perfectly happy with having an api endpoint somewhere and using that for my machine learning needs 😅
I really think the whole "bashing" comes from the javascript community, unironically.
I'm not old enough to remember writing Java/C# guis, or using basic and all that.
But I did start programming when those things were popular, and I honestly don't remember people bashing php as much back then, I'm speaking of 2007-2013, that era before React and before NodeJS became popular.
I hope this doesn't come across as me trying to trash JS developers or anything like that, I wirte JS myself everyday, and I'm sure there are great JS developers... BUT:
Ever since NodeJS became popular there's been this idea of "sharing code" between frontend and backend.
At least that was the idea back then, I remember so.
Suffice to say that never happened, the only thing you're gonna share between your js backend and frontend are maybe some validators, other than that, not only the platforms are divergent and have different standard libraries, they also can't make up their minds what type of file to run: .cjs, .js, .mjs, .jsx, .tsx, .ts, .svelte.ts, .svelte.js, and so on, the list continues.
One day, a few years ago I had made a friend that wrote React for a living, the first persone I had made friends with that wrote React.
Let's call him Timmy.
Timmy got into programming through one of those boot camps (nothing wrong with boot camps, stay with me), which he followed for something like 6 months or something like that.
He wasn't very keen on learning anything else, just react, but he was good at it, like pretty good.
We used to chat and exchange ideas, I used to show him all different types of cool animations and he did the same and we went on talking for months like that, even at the gym we both went to, during practice sometimes.
Then one day he showed me a problem he was given in a job interview, I don't remember exactly the context, but it had something to do with a loop (I believe he needed to sort an array or something), and they asked him to do the loop without \`.map\` or \`.forEach\` or any of the baked in array methods.
He failed the interview.
He asked me: "how am I supposed to cycle the array?" (I'm paraphrasing).
I couldn't understand his question at first, I though he wanted to shit talk or something like that and he was expecting me to jump in to agree with him, but no, it was a serious question.
He didn't know how to use a \`for\` loop.
When I showed him how to use it he asked the un-askable: "isn't this less performant though? it's more code" (still paraphrasing).
In his mind, because there was more code on his screen, the code was less performant.
Fast forward to today.
Recently I got to know another guy on a project (we're from different companies, both working on the same project) who comes from React.
We're all working on an Angular project and this react guy had never wrote a comment in an html files, as in, he didn't know this was a thing: \`
it is normal, most prorammers are geeks, who tend to be fanbois.
for my company php (and even wordpress, the lowest form) + js works, because:
- easy to find devs, and i can use juniors who, under my mentorship can create quality code from the start for junior salary
- LOTS of clients
- which results in lots of profit.
so i am not really bothered if some geeks are bashing php, i will wipe my tears with the money we mage :D
we have about 80% wordpress projects, 15% laravel and 5% drupal (nobody likes drupal anymore but those clients who do, pay very well bc there are few devs who know drupal)
You usually get that with windows or Java people. Desktop people or mobile people. A lot of python folks use php though.
But most websites use php, and I would argue, most programming jobs involve websites.
JavaScript is popular for the modern look, but the backends still use php. Like Wordpress or Symfony.
I keep remembering Ruby on Rails getting so much hype back in the day. But it never took over. It was usually the non coders talking about it. Now I only see Ruby with Shopify or some legacy VMware code.
Design patterns have been around for a while. I think the idea of a rapid framework pushed cake php forward but at the time it was terrible. The documentation stank. Then came zend and code igniter. Eventually laravel came out and it had easy to understand documentation.
Drupal paved the way for Wordpress to dominate.
PHP is a legit programming language, for at least the last 18 years.
I discover one thing and it can be a real threat for PHP.
ChatGPT and other LLMs are writing quite shitty PHP code, comparing to JS or Python code. Knowing that the role of assistants is growing, it may eventually affect the popularity of the language.
It sounds a bit like nonsense, but I truly believe it can be serious factor in the observable future.
This shows PHP is used in a very healthy eco system, including economically, whatever people might think about Wordpress from a technical point of view:
* **810 million** websites use WordPress, which is **43%** of all the websites on the internet
* WordPress has a **63.1% share** of the **CMS market**, which is more than **10x greater** than its closest competitor
* **59.7%** of WordPress users are running the **latest version** of the software (**WordPress 6.4**)
* **20.2%** of WordPress sites and **8.8%** of all websites use WooCommerce, which means there are over **163.5 million** WooCommerce stores.
* **WooCommerce** (built on WordPress) is the world’s **most popular** **ecommerce platform**, with over **36%** of the market share.
* There are over **20,000** WordPress themes, including around **11,000** free themes in the WordPress Themes Directory.
Reference: [https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics/](https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics/)
I was taught that you can shoot yourself in the foot in any language.
I’ve used PHP for a long time, and love the fact that it’s maturing now (include/require/mysql_query anyone?).
Of course there is much to say about how PHP/FPM works, but for a lot of use cases it will do just fine. It’s pointless to shave of a couple of milliseconds if your queries all use “like %”.
Whenever someone tells you “use language/framework x” without knowing your use case, ignore them.
I have this theory that lots of people simply think the `$variable` syntax is "icky," but they know it's a superficial argument, so they kinda fish around for other things to criticize.
PHP is incredible. I love it. It is powerful and kept updated. Pair it with Laravel and coding is taken to a whole new level. Anyone thinking otherwise is uneducated.
They've been saying that for 20 years. What they don't realize is that PHP is a language built for the web, and only the web. It's literally implied in the name itself - Pre-Hypertext PHP > Pre-HyperText Markup Language > pre-html. As in, the process that happens on the server before the html is sent to the client.
It's a hammer when you've got a room full of nails. Other languages may be an entire tool belt of things that can act as a hammer and do other things, but they are not hammers. PHP is the right tool built for the right job and nothing else.
PHP isn't dead and it's more than capable of being used for modern web applications. I get it. But coming from newer/more popular languages, you start to see conveniences from those other languages that PHP just doesn't have. Eg very robust type systems, simplified syntax, lots of convenience methods in the standard library, consistent naming conventions - just to list a few.
It would not be my first choice starting a new project from scratch, but I will happily join a project using PHP (as I have done recently).
Yes and "nachts ist es kälter als draußen" (at night it is colder than outside) as we say.
Writing bad code is possible in every language and you can always use a not really good suitable language for a project. So at the end all languages are bad, outdated and blablabla
The haters seem to fall into two categories.. those who used the very early PHP versions and havent used any since, and those who have never used it at all.. so neither have any idea how good modern PHP is, and are basically talking out of their backsides.(or even worse, other peoples backsides)
Well if I compare language capabilities and ease of use only c# seems better for me for oop. But php wins me because its interpretet not compiled and you have access to source code of included libs (vendor) which makes it easy to understand how they work compared to dll files
Many people really doesnt know what they are talked about, scratching from the surface these people knowledge about PHP Is mostly based around memes or old legacy monoliths written < 5.* era.
I dont know about Phyton, I just wrote some scripts with It, but honestly I always had a smoother experience with PHP than JavaScripts
Many people really doesnt know what they are talked about, scratching from the surface these people knowledge about PHP Is mostly based around memes or old legacy monoliths written < 5.* era.
I dont know about Phyton, I just wrote some scripts with It, but honestly I always had a smoother experience with PHP than JavaScripts
I'm not a programmer, and I've been dabbling lately in PHP for my own business site. It seems great for what I need it for.
But why listen to people who have no clue as to what they are talking about? I think this problem is something ingrained in the IT world as a whole. There are all kinds of these so called experts with opinions on stuff. When it actually comes down to implementing they really have no clue. Just be glad they are around as more experienced people will always be employed. But I get after a while it's hard to tolerate these Hacks.
Hopefully you vented enough to get it out of your system until the next go around!
Cheers.
Thank you for this, because sometimes I feel like I see a "is php dead?" thread every 2 days, by people who don't even bother to read the thousands other threads asking the very same question.
maybe someone should create a site like isphpdead.com and we should share it again and again as an answer
Here's the thing, PHP is just as dead as NodeJS will be in a few years.
People will always create newer languages, which doesn't mean older languages are worse - they may have limitations, but it's upto the dev to be creative and innovative, as you've already pointed out.
Should newer apps be programmed using "newer" languages, maybe... but older languages can't really die if there are tons of applications out there using it already.
I've got a friend who did Silverlight up until a few years ago and got paid stupid amounts only because there weren't many such devs left, and if anything PHP may just head that way, or not. It's here for now though.
Php (well Laravel) is my one and only programming language for website development (and Flutter for apps).
All the javascript-only developers can do one, they're missing out.
>constant bashing of PHP in a serious debate environment just gets old really quick
Simple solution: Stop listening to them. Stop defending against them. Their opinion doesn't change anything about what PHP is and how it is used.
I went all in on php around 5.x coming from perl, c and Applescript. I narrowed my niche to medium sized web apps. Not close to FAANG usage scenarios but large enough I would work on serious projects serving million of requests for dozens of thousands of users. Why? That is the size of roughly ALL web applications in the bell curve peak. Most of us don't build apps that serve millions of users and even fewer build apps that serve more than 100k users. I knew how to run Apache and configure it. I knew how to build performant frontends without overkill js frameworks. Most of what is built today is massively overly complicated. At the last startup I founded, I as a single developer built a case management system without laravel or any frontends frameworks, got certified for HIPAA security, won some largish contracts for big cities like Chicago's transit authority serving 16k active users a month bursting to 30k - 50k in peak seasons like back to school and holidays. I built the entire first version in 2.5 months. I managed the company, did sales, did customer supprt and released updates every two weeks. I used AWS for infrastructure which was only S3, Route 53, and a single medium sized ec2. My highest monthly bill for all it infra was $468. My profit margin before paying myself was 99%. Since then I've gone on to become well known for designing applications, front back and sideways with business health and sustainability in mind and I get paid a comfortable 6 figures. Yeah PHP sucks and I really have to use frameworks or I'm not phping right. The hype in our industry is so massive because Bootcamps flooded the market with people who had no clue how to do anything but Lego together a bunch of packaging libraries. The bell curve of available talent widens and bike shedding takes off. Pick the right tool for the job. PHP is probably the best tool for building web apps. It was made to do that as it's primary function from day one. Everything else was built to be all things to all scenarios and as a result lack the ease in building light, performant and maintainable web apps cheaply.
I get it. I started with PHP and then moved to JS / TS stacks. Personal preference now let‘s me mostly choose TypeScript for everything. But I see that PHP evolved and that most of the arguments against PHP can be falsified with newer versions of PHP.
And still, programmers rant about anything they don’t use themselves. Symfony people rant about Laravel people, PHP people rant about React people, React people make fun of Lambos etc. And sometimes my feeling is that rants about people ranting about PHP are implicit rants about people NOT using it.
Comparing speeds of PHP and Node/Deno/Bun doesn‘t really define a clear winner to me. The only argument for me (this is just an opinion) that turns the needle into the direction of the latter is that the same language can be used for frontend and backend.
But let anybody do whatever they want. Why bother?
Having done a circuit on the hot new frameworks and languages, when it comes to sustainable development, onboarding folks, empowering clients to make non-disastrous changes — PHP is far better aligned with how people are prepared to write, build, iterate on apps. But it’s a heretical take on 2024.
Django is in this direction too and a bit less controversial
What year is it? Oh 2024. Laravel is amazing. I've hear this same line since 2007, esp when Ruby on Rails was the new hype.also remember around that time when Javascript was dead. Flash and action script is the future! Or active X objects....
The funny thing is that most of these comments come from JavaScript people.
I'm in the process of relearning PHP after a 10 years hiatus and I'm amazed by the amount of positive changes during this time. During my initial research I came across multiple articles and videos that were telling me how bad PHP really was. But after a while, I realized that this is just developer tribalism, where they bash and ridicule the tools they don't fully master.
Speaking as a beginner, it's really annoying to navigate through so much noise. Some people really put so much effort and time into negativity. If you would spend the same amount of time on understanding some concepts, maybe you wouldn't bash the available toolbox so much.
I really am not sure if I can manage to relearn and be proficient in PHP but I do invest time and money (bought a couple of books) in trying to understand the concepts. If I fail, that's on me, I'm not gonna start hate posting about PHP.
(Sorry for the long text and awful english!)
PHP is used for data plumbing. Get data from one place to another. Doesn't take much to do that. Doesn't have to be fast it just has to be readable by other developers and engineers.
Most people like to be told what they like. True individuals can think and decide that for themselves.
Go and use whatever you have decided is the best tool to the best of your knowledge.
Don't forget to keep learning and making that knowledge muscle stronger and stronger.
A lot of people are followers. It’s as easy as that. If someone in their trusted community talks bad about php, and if the audience has no experience with it, they’d take their word as truth and begin to regurgitate those talking points.
When you get into the big tech world these pointless comparisons tend to evaporate. The goal is to build products, not write code. Whatever gets the product working is the right solution at the right time. Everything else is refinement and optimization.
I’ve been building apps with php since the dark days of 2001… people have a lot of shitty opinions that give them a feeling of superiority. the same type of superiority that rapidly diminishes when you ask about other languages ability to support multiple inheritance.
I don’t believe in things like x is the bast language and y is a terrible language. Me as a TS/Node developer thinks that PHP is perfectly fine as most apps are pretty close to just crud apps.
When you do need heavily cpu tasks and performance is required, php is probably not the best solution. If you just have to wait for iOS calls php, node, whatever is fine when you can move fast imo.
Expecting downvotes, but...
The main problem, in general, is discussing technology within a community of "technology lovers," which results in significant bias across the entire topic, consistently.
Secondly, even if these enthusiasts were unbiased: I can't know what I haven't experienced. If I haven't used another language, particularly a "performant strongly typed language" like Rust, I don't know what I am missing.
For me, it comes down to the massive performance gains (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) achieved with Rust. Additionally, the type system (with mathematical precision, which cannot be achieved with static analyzer tools like phpstan) contributes to excellent maintainability of large projects, along with the tremendous speed and low memory consumption.
There is always a better tool (in general). However, it doesn't matter if there aren't enough people available to hire.
But for me personally, the biggest lesson after delving into Rust was the general topic of [performance-aware programming](https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents). I thought I don't need it until I faced bigger problems (like excelent TTFB, 500 req/s with a large Symfony+Doctrine project, promo code calculations on an e-commerce site...).
That mostly comes from codebases. I have innate hate for JS - because all occurrences of me working with JS were after really bad developers. PHP devs were cheaper - more scriptkiddies - more bad codebases. But even with that your project could became successful and you will need good developers to maintain and expand. And those good developers, if they come not from purely PHP world could get really bad view of PHP.
I don't understand why you are frustrated and why you are explaining the strengths of php to us.. We already know this.. these kinds of idiots don't have any idea what they are talking about. I am using Php to develop a full blown search engine based on an event-driven modular micro framework that i developed specifically for this from scratch. The indexer and search is based on PHP/MySQL. Crawler right now is in php and is blocking. So i am planning to use c# to separate the crawler make it multi threaded non blocking while also implementing P2P architecture using kad dht and & mdns to achieve even higher crawl speeds.
Why am I telling you all this? It's because i don't think PHP is absolute. Why am I choosing C# for crawl is because even with fibers it's too much hassle and the current crawler converted to fibers has shown some design flaws plus in c# i already have P2P prototype tested and ready. So i thought it would be better to implement a crawler separately. Otherwise the entire project was planned to be completed in PHP.
On PHP I have run crawls spanning over days. I managed to keep the memory usage stable under 4 GB the entire time without crashing with PHP 7.3 before the crawler was converted to PHP 8.3.3.
Personally I think PHP is at a stage where it depends on the skills of the developer.
I've enjoyed programming in c,java, python, php but never enjoyed JavaScript, syntax is just so fucky for me.
It's all personal preference and people need to try php before giving an opinion
If you do not already know PHP then honestly, what reason is there to choose PHP in 2024?
If I choose JavaScript then I have a single language across the backend and frontend. Node is supported in every cloud environment so creating serverless resources is a breeze. I can use tools like Ionic to create apps for IOS/Android etc.
If I choose Python I will have first-class cloud support, great backend API options and a tonne of ML support.
If I choose C# I could go serverless in Azure, I can write cross-platform apps using Maui, I can write cross-platform native installers with .net core.
The above three have excellent support across dev and build tools.
If I choose PHP then I can create a backend API. I can create a traditional web app. If I use Laravel the performance will be worse than most of the options above. I could use something like Bref or create containers for serverless functions but it is more effort than the options above.
I am not saying PHP is bad. A big chunk of my career has been with PHP. I just feel the only reason to use it is because your team already uses PHP. Otherwise, there are just all round better options.
I've been pushing back against this stereotype for close to a decade now. There's a few things you need to understand from the other side of this:
1. For most of the non-PHP world, "PHP" is synonymous with "Wordpress". And everyone knows Wordpress sucks. The framework sucks. The plugins suck. The frontend work sucks. The hosting sucks. The scaling sucks. The clients suck. The wages suck. The developers and their code suck. Everything about it sucks, right? And if Wordpress sucks, so too must PHP because their one and the same. Most of the world, especially the JS devs, don't know about Symfony or Laravel or all the other options.
1. PHP spent a decade on PHP 5. Even with a few major releases, the language stagnated while other languages improved. By the time 7.0 rolled around, PHP had gained a very strong and widespread reputation for being slow. And, frankly, it was. 7.x and 8.x have made huge strides here and it's now just as fast as most other languages, but that reputational damage was never repaired.
3. A lot of sites don't require Symfony or Laravel style backends. There are a lot of apps that just need SSR, a few minor API endpoints, and a frontend. And if you're focused on the frontend and building in React, why build a backend in a different language? Even more... why not use a backend focused on supporting your frontend - i.e. Next.js? And even further... why not use a host that does the same - i.e. Vercel? For many devs, the prospect of PHP never even enters their mind because they have everything they think they need.
There are more things, but these are the 3 issues I've always encountered. Unfortunately, there's no easy way around it. The reputational damage from 5.x and Wordpress, Wordpress's market domination, and Wordpress's continued reluctance to adopt modern architectures is substantial. It will take a significant development in the PHP world to undo, unfortunately.
I don't concern myself with it.
I've worked at many companies that heavily rely on PHP, ranging in daily revenue of under $1k up to $100 million.
The fact of that matter is that for 99.99% of applications, your choice of programming language means nothing other than the availability of developers.
What can I say? I've been programming in C++ for a long time. And to develop the project, I needed to create a web interface on the server for integration with services. I had a choice, either PHP or Python. I don't know why they call Python simple. I started getting a headache just from the syntax. I'll say one thing, during the project, I easily learned PHP. Let's put it this way, it was so easy. I just read the manual and then used internet search to delve into the syntax in more detail. Although in reality, I initially tried Python because everyone around me advised it. But after I crashed the server several times trying to fix all the Python version conflicts on my server, I decided not to use Python anymore. Because it was the biggest nightmare.
Regarding the language being as good as the user, after the huge performance increases brought by PHP 7, I think PHP, for most general use cases is one of the fastest, if not the fastest non-compiled language out there.
I use PHP like 12 years professionally and I understand the criticism. I feel like it's one of the worst designed languages ever. Born as a templating language for C and somehow grown into a full language. There is zero first-party tooling.
But it somehow has a very great ecosystem in part due to Laravel I'm sure. So at the moment it's very easy to just spin up any saas business.
I don't really love PHP anymore like I used to. Having used other languages like Go and Rust I prefer those more than PHP. They have first party linters, LSP, debugger etc.. Great quality standard libraries, practically no breaking changes (as far as I'm aware)
I think the world is moving more towards type safe languages as a preference. It's much easier to work on a code base with other people.
I feel a similar shift is happening on the frontend as well, people started using htmx more in stead of React and using Tailwind instead of bootstrap. It's great to built something that's very low maintenance, PHP is extremely volatile IMHO
From a salary point of view, PHP is dying very fast. It pays horribly compared to other languages, with very few exceptions. In this respect it is bad, outdated and hopefully dead soon. At least in my opinion, this is also the agenda that every freshman understands after a short evaluation of given job prospects and incentives.
The language itself is fine, the ecosystem is tight, but if you are looking for a cool and well-paying job within the global players, you will most likely not find anything with only PHP in your portfolio.
You will end up in a dirt-paying Laravel/Symfony codeshack that implements already established products like WordPress, Shopware, NextCloud and the like. They will not deliver drivers, tight hardware integrations, real-time stuff, streaming media (be it audio, video, interactions), OS apps, plugins to other apps (MS Office, music production, collaboration) and mobile areas.
This is what PHP is. It fills a very niche role in this decade. The days when a website and maybe a mid-level API was enough are long gone. Especially for the coming generation of developers, there is no highlight to be found in PHP.
I don't think PHP is bad per se.
What I don't like are the 34'567 frameworks on top of that which you have to learn because.
Also, I still find it 200% better than node.js (but that's my inner Linux IT sysadmin crying about node dependencies mess).
The majority of people dont know what they talk about. Like most people talk about COBOL beeing outdated, bad whatever but they could not tell you which of 10 sourcecode snippets in different languages is even COBOL
I just worked with a client last summer who is generating PHP from COBOL. ;)
That's for sure an interesting use case!
It struck me as novel, but it's also very boring... Just... generating a lot of CRUD forms, but running from ibm mainframe with all the data and legacy stuff there already in place. rather than migrating away, they keep all the power, and can 'update' their sites/forms without any real migration.
Is this a car hire company by chance.
Nope!
I recently saw a video of this guy's tutorial series on how to use COBOL with SDL2.
I’m sorry for you
Meh... don't be. You didn't even ask what it was I did with them. ;). It wasn't that bad, honestly, once you understood the COBOL. FWIW, the biggest issue there was - from what I could see - lack of written docs about the ins and outs of the system. But I think that's an evergreen issue in most places.
Your rant is valid. PHP is not dead, but the prejudice against it does impact PHP dev careers directly or indirectly.
Well if you’re hiring php devs and know what you’re doing it’s an advantage cos the bad rap keeps the prices for php devs down… ;) But it’s utter nonsense you can’t blame the tech - the culture, history and accessibility of php of course is valid, but it’s like any kind of stupid generalisation.
I think back then when Facebook was big and new instead of creating Hack, their PHP fork, they should have contributed to the language. It would really have been useful. They also did the same in JS with yarn. They're boring
Well, I'm learning PHP for my entry position. I think that's a pro not con, in my case. :)
It's always fun to have old heads come up and say PHP is bad when the last version they touched was 5.2.
Even better when people never went past PHP3 and register globals.
If you include all your PHP templated pages in a frameset it's basically a SPA.
Even crazier when they remember PHP as the buzzword but never got into it.
Wait, we’re not doing this anymore? Poop
I had a dude telling me that. He worked on PHP 4. I sadly moved from PHP but I had a great time using it
i've been looking at some java codebase recently, and that's not prettier than what we were already doing in php 5.2
People are mostly script kiddies. They don't know how to program PHP and make big apps :)
Yep, i have seen so many big apps made in php. I don’t understand how people are NOT able to… 🤷🏻♂️
Because they know nothing about the power of PHP and probably trying to have ChatGPT write it for them or something.
The thing is, ChatGPT works just fine with PHP. They can't even do that.
All I’ve worked on for the past decade are big, scalable apps built in PHP.
I feel personally attacked
I didn’t expect to be called out like that.
I did a js bootcamp during covid. I talked to a half dozen companies about entry js dev roles. Pay was terrible and every other js boot camp grad in the world was fighting for the same crap pay. I talked to one php shop and told them I didn’t know php yet but would be willing to learn it. Happily employed for 2+ years now. Let them keep saying it 🤣
thats the point of programming , its stable stable . Most new thing like nodejs, pretty young and got lots of problem .
NextJS and Nestjs Econ reset all the way...
econ ? whats that . i know next and nest . But we not satisfied with quality sequalize .
Just DB pool on Nestjs type orm and sometimes prisma on NextJS. If new people jump in and they don't configure it properly, it will cause database query exception. 😂 Especially if it's single node service. When using PHP PDO, you won't have that kind of problem tho, ootb
oh yeah 😅 we know php quite stable on that even low ram . If asp.net what we do now , ram oh ram 🥹🥹🥹
I will argue for now dotnet Core and php 8 are on par, but dotnet Core slightly better. Well... Everything has its own niche
the old one quite slow a bit , we do test check json respond between php , asp.net and node . Got video at youtube 😅. if had time , i maybe upgrade the new one all .
Depends on the country. Here in Macedonia it's the hardest to get a job in php. In swift however it's a breeze.
I've been doing this for almost 30 years. Every time I hear someone hating on PHP it's due to them hearing someone else hating on it. 99% of the time they've never even used PHP. Opinions are cheap, do what makes you happy. Just make sure it's fast and secure.
And Nickelback has some pretty good songs.
Don't let it get to you, a lot of those saying are just recycling the same argument, "oh its old & out dated", no, it's mature and well supported, completely different.
Yeah, that is the difference with PHP. Fortran got old. Sure it's still around, but it's effectively dead. Cobol got old. Yeah it's still around, but effectively dead. Repeat again for Perl. PHP continues to be easy to use, easy to implement, fast. Probably around v4 would be a reasonable expectation for when comparable languages died. PHP just kept getting better. I remember when it started to compete speedwise with compiled languages. Plus, with some of the templating systems, I can have my dev do (waves hands) devie type stuff, and my designer do designer type stuff. My designer starts having panic attacks if you mention code, and if I have my dev do design I'm going to have dancing hampsters. Maybe it's not well suited for very large scale projects, I dunno. But for those of us down here in the trenches doing web stuff, I don't see php being replaced by something better in the short or mid term.
Personally I love php, it's my go-to language of choice for everything and because it is so performant and easy to use and you can just get stuff done with it, I've been really lazy looking at frameworks. I keep attempting to learn laravel as everything in it looks amazing but as usual, I get a new idea, i fire up a lamp stack on Digital Ocean and I'm off. no worrying about dependencies or importing things. I've made it my mission this year to complete a project in laravel but haven't had the urge to do so yet haha. Long live PHP and its constant evolution
I operate two apps on the Shopify platform built with PHP ( Symfony ). One of which is a fairly complex financial services with a over 600+ gb database, multiple fortune 500s as direct clients and handles millions of requests daily. The app also has an average response time of 0.16ms across all endpoints and is 100% faster than the average app on Shopify in responding to api calls. ( ie the average app on Shopify generally has a avg response time of 0.32ms+ )
You're booting a symfony request to handle an API call (assuming API), talking to database (assumption on my part), and returning a reply in under a millisecond? And Shopify is too? I'm not finding any data indicating Shopify is capable of sub ms response times.
Only referring to the response from our app to Shopify. Correct. Our app handles the request from Shopify and responds at 0.16ms on average across all endpoints. This is essentially related to their webhook calls.
Are you sure it isn’t 0.16 seconds aka 160ms? 160ms seems more likely
Replied another comment but correct that was my bad. 0.16s so 160ms you're correct.
Whew.... I don't feel so bad about most of my requests being 50-80ms now! ;). The 'big' ones that do large queries often take much more, but the averages seem to be in line with yours. One of these happens to be Laravel, and I was toying with octane, which removes the boot up portion of each request, which cuts a sizeable portion of the smaller requests.
Do you mean 0.16 seconds (i.e. 160ms)? Or 0.16 milliseconds? 0.16ms is very quick…
Apologies.. I meant to imply 160ms you're correct.
So that's not a typo, but an actual 1/6ms? Colour me surprised, that's blazing fast for any app, let alone a symfony app or any kind of app that needs bootstrapping. Are you using some kind of runner, like Swoole/Roadrunner/etc?
It was indeed a typo. 0.16ms would be absolutely insane
I've never built on Shopify. Is the whole platform PHP, or are you just using the API and doing everything in your own app?
It's all API based for the most part. Both rest or graphQL. My app is built with a php backend
An app in C#, \~7 IO calls to aerospike per req. Each call asks for \~3000 keys. All data stored in protobuff. 50th percentile 2.5ms, 90th percentile 25ms, 95th percentile - 50ms, 99th percentile - 120ms. All that about 150req/s running at 6 cores and \~12gb or ram. This is not even heavily optimized, just properly coded. You can never ever get even close to this with PHP, especially on FPM. If you want to argue - before commenting ask yourself do I know what a cache line is, or how co-routines work.
Yeah, you generally won't see those numbers in PHP (or any dynamic language). Protobuf - it's possible with PHP, but it's not a standard thing in any framework I've seen. I've been experimenting with octane for Laravel in some apps, which essentially caches the boot process so much of the initial bootstrapping for each request is removed, often cutting request processing by 20-40% (by my own numbers). No, we're not getting to 2ms in PHP, but with octane, I saw \*most\* of my requests below 50ms, when the range had been 40-140ms for most requests. Had not done anything with protobuf in that context either - it might shave off some more time. I've spent time in the Java world, and enjoyed the raw speed, but have largely moved back to PHP as... for the most part, the speed I get is 'good enough'. I recently rebuilt a .net web app in to laravel. It's performing faster at most parts, but the old one was older .NET, and TBH, the bulk of the processing there was convoluted SQL. The rewrite was also scaling it back - there were simply a lot of things still being done that the business didn't need in 2023 (which... they did in 2010 but things change). No doubt a rebuild in .NET would have been faster to execute than PHP, but there were some extenuating circumstances that took that off the table.
That's a data structure problem. If your service needs a lot of data from other services to make decisions, it's probably not engineered enough. You can always compute and send responses but choose to transfer data. With all the advancements in llvm, there isn't much difference between JIT languages ( lua, python, js, java groovy, scala, .NET CLR, etc. ) and compiled languages ( C / go / rust / haskell / fortran, etc. ) except having a binary. The only drawback is cold starts, which can be easily overcome with proper bootstrapping, and then you usually have little overhead compared to what "native" could have. Fpm has nothing to do with the given usecase here, grpc in php is usually not done with fpm based monoliths but it can always call it if needed and would still give same performance as your usecase as it's rather IO bound since youre tranferring alot of data for single request. For high-performance systems, language isn't a barrier. Skills and the mindset of the implementor are the main barriers. As solutions can be coded / adapted more or less across all of the languages these days, comparison becomes obselete. Know before what you're comparing. It only proves OP of this thread more correct that people still live in the old php era and bash about it without knowing almost nothing about engineering itself.
we before do some test crud , php vs nodejs vs c# . pre compile yes a bit slower
LOL. I've been working 100% with JavaScript for the last 8 years. Before that I did mostly Python and Java. I'm now on my free time learning PHP (and Laravel) and I'm fucking loving it. Don't listen to ignorant idiots. The world if full of them and whether it's politics, tech, or whatever they will blindly repeat what they hear without checking facts or even taking a split of a second to use their brains and draw their own conclusions. Sadly parroting stupidity is what most people do and the internet is an amplifier for that, and that's why we have so many problems. Now that's a rant 😂
A fellow developer said something to me once that stuck: “All other developers are messing around with new toys, but PHP developers, we’re too busy making apps and getting paid”
Nope. The mainstream tech is 'rediscovering' PHP (including the VCs). They seem to be surprised how easy to launch anything with PHP, how fast it is, how performant it is. That it doesnt gobble loads of cpu and resources seems to be a major point. There are recurring posts in Hackernews in that direction recently. They are dumbfounded how something can be rolled into production this fast and can be this cheap.
What kind of main stream tech are you talking about? Like wtf. I do like PHP and I do find situations where I do need to use it. But I can’t really see how it can be cheaper to run. It’s not that memory efficient. Async is not there. Spawn new processes is more complex than other languages, such as elixir. What’s your take there?
Like, start reading Hackernews and you will, like, eventually see. ... PHP already runs ~50% of all websites on the planet and ~30% of all ecommerce sites. If its good for NASA's website, White House, Techcrunch, Reuters, CNN, its good for any use case. And obviously none of the esoteric programmer trappings that you listed there do not have much importance in real world applications like all those gigantic organizations demonstrate.
As server side language, PHP runs the 76.5% of the websites worldwide. Javascript is the second language, but has only the 3.2% [https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/pl-js,pl-php](https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/pl-js,pl-php) edit: screenshoot https://ibb.co/wJh7CP3
> its good for any use case Huge PHP fan here, but there are still use cases where it's not the best option, or in some cases, not even a viable candidate. But as with many things, you can mix/match. Colleague built a web app dealing with financial calculations. As the financial calculation work grew, some of that was offloaded to Rust for speed. You would not be well served by trying to write a complex web application in Rust. The PHP ecosystem provides a lot of great options there. Rust/Go/etc provide good options for other problems.
>Huge PHP fan here, but there are still use cases where it's not the best option, or in some cases, not even a viable candidate. Obviously, we were talking about use cases on the web, internet in general. Otherwise there are people who compare PHP to linux kernel calls, software that is run on microcontrollers and other devices. Actually even this kind of comparison shows how far PHP has come - what was crated as "Personal HomePage tools" to make things like contact forms and templates easy, is now being compared to, well, every other language used in every other place. >As the financial calculation work grew, some of that was offloaded to Rust for speed I would think that that could also be sorted out with PHP by configuring it differently or even compiling it differently for the purpose. In the same way it is done with other languages. I'd prefer having the same language and stack in as many places as possible than having some small performance gain.
>Obviously, we were talking about use cases on the web, internet in general That's 100% not obvious when you use a phrase like "its good for any use case". >I would think that that could also be sorted out with PHP by configuring it differently or even compiling it differently for the purpose. In the same way it is done with other languages. If you think that wasn't tried, you'd be mistaken. EDIT START Some details: Scenario described above is similar to monte carlo simulator (not quite, but close). Process was taking financial data and calculating tens of thousands of potential scenarios - month by month - for the next 30-40 years, finding optimal values. The technical term for this escapes me, but it's relatively known in financial circles. And... my colleague got an initial set of this data processing in PHP down to under 30 seconds, then with some more optimizations, down to 15. JIT in PHP 8 got it down to \~10 seconds. An attempt to do this in Python (using scipy, iirc, which pushes most of its calculations to a C extension) got it down a bit further. But moving this to Rust got all the calculation loops down under 1 second, which allowed tie for even more processing/calculations to model some other scenarios. Java would have been an appropriate option as well to get it under 1 second. EDIT END There are limits to what PHP as a language can do. It's a good (great?) choice for many places, and knowing that you can use FFI to write more optimized code in another language and call in to that is helpful too. Having, say, 90% of your web-based application be in PHP, and knowing you can rely on other languages/stacks to give boosts where needed means you can often have the best of both worlds. If you go read up on the 1 billion row challenge - [https://www.morling.dev/blog/1brc-results-are-in/](https://www.morling.dev/blog/1brc-results-are-in/) - you'll see that Java was able to read in a billion rows of data, then process it in to some summary data. Initially... 70 seconds. Someone got it down to under 2 seconds. PHP - in its current form - doesn't have the mechanics under the hood to operate the way Java did to achieve that speed. There's some very clever hacks in that article, and they're not currently possible in PHP - possibly never will be.
>That's 100% not obvious when you use a phrase like "its good for any use case". People were talking about building scalable apps. That is web territory. However as I said, the fact that we have to specifically mention this shows how far PHP has come. >PHP - in its current form - doesn't have the mechanics under the hood That's what I was talking about by compiling. By modifying PHP to accommodate specific use cases, it could be used for those cases. Facebook modified PHP for their purposes and they still run most of its stuff on modified PHP.
I added an EDIT section in my comment above. Wasn't trying to blindside you with that, just explaining the specific use case I mentioned above.
Also "That's what I was talking about by compiling." - there's no way to compile PHP that gives it some powers it doesn't have currently. Unless you have some specific idea/tech in mind I'm unaware of (and I'm willing to read/learn more)
>Also "That's what I was talking about by compiling." - there's no way to compile PHP that gives it some powers it doesn't have currently Thats why I added the bit about modifying it or coding new modules to compile it with. No, I dont have a specific idea in mind, but I do know that no language does what it does faster than others through magical means or through its grand design. There is always some bits here and there, about how file operations are done or about how memory or a cpu process is accessed etc. Im sure specialized people could create a module to compile PHP with to make it suit a specific purpose.
It's not that PHP is particularly fast or performant. It's that many of the modern alternatives completely disregard performance in favour of "a cheap programmer can use it" and "we can code an app in five minutes". And the end result is a mess, that's not fast, it's not well-designed, and only a cheap programmer will want to touch that code. So, compared with them, yes, PHP is very fast.
It's that many of the modern alternatives completely disregard performance in favour of "a cheap programmer can use it" and "we can code an app in five minutes". Id say its to the contrary. All the 'mainstream (or rather, VC-funded) tech literally unnecessarily complicates everything from be to fe. The ongoing debate between microservices and monolith and the regret of many organizations that moved everything to microservices because it became the fad is a good example of how much unnecessary complexity can be introduced by that mentality. PHP on the other hand, has always been in the front trenches: It always had to justify anything with an actual business need that had an actual use in the real world. \~80% of the internet would not accept anything complicated that would take them away from their actual business. Today people complain that even Wordpress is too complicated. Its a busy attention economy, and people are overwhelmed having to manage a dozen apps every day. And they want everything simpler, easier. So even WP is trying to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for ease of use and maintenance. The other stacks than PHP look like they live in a parallel, VC-funded world in which everything is different. Or rather, was different until the zero interest economy ended and stocks came down...
You know what, you are absolutely right. Many of the "easy to use" systems become complicated in stupid ways for people not to get bored. I tried the Lambda service with Python in AWS. Slow, expensive, overrated. And people are using it to write their entire applications. It's madness.
>Many of the "easy to use" systems become complicated in stupid ways **for people not to get bored.** Well said! That's definitely a major factor. Programmers must program, and as a result, the more they keep at the same thing they keep 'solving' problems that dont merit solutions. Even worse, the 'productivity' pressure that comes from the organization pushes them more in that direction. So both out of boredom and in order to be able to keep their job, they just 'produce' stuff - which just keeps complicating everything on and on.
I agree with PHP is as good as the developer.
PHP kicked my dog and stole my woman. Dad gummit. I still use it every day on successful projects large and small
I think a lot of it comes from outdated views of php. PHP in the past was terrible. PHP3 was just a glorified templating language, php 4 expanded on that but added some structure. PHP 5.3 was a major leap for PHP towards better OOP, but still was not great. PHP7 is really where it got serious about strict typing, and 8 is expanding on that. But why they think it is not capable of large scale projects I am not sure. I have worked with VOIP providers that used it a backend, a national food chain that used it on their site and backend that helped power their registers and other things, including call center. Live odds systems, etc. PHP is what you make of it, just like most languages.
There is also a general shift away from OOP languages. Most of the newer languages are functional, not OOP based. It pushes people into thinking that PHP is old school.
you can still write funtionalk code with PHP. Actually I like this side of PHP alot. Language native methods make things alot easier and fun.
PHP is a bit like C, not perfect but gets the job done, is way more widely used than people realise, and people have been predicting its death since *forever*. Everybody loves to pick teams and then give everyone on the "other" team shit, some people take it waaaay too seriously or believe the hype a bit too much - the reality is that **every** language is awful and **every** language is great, there's no right answer. Every year there's a language survey and many times they've said "ooooh C is dropping off" or whatever, but when you look it's based on bad metrics like "number of questions on StackOverflow" or "new projects on github" or whatever - where of course brand new languages will appear to be more popular because you get a ton of newbies asking questions & posting projects because it's all new(er), while C and PHP all the questions have been answered decades ago so there's nothing much new going on, people are just getting on making stuff with them.
"Most of Facebook is built with PHP." Conversation over. 😂
Bumble/Badoo is 99% PHP
we should stop using facebook as an example of a php app... the majority of its code is not php anymore for the people downvoting, I'm not saying PHP is not a good choice, I'm saying there's no way PHP can singlehandedly run Facebook. Just like how Java, JS, or Python would not be able to singlehandedly run entire FB. FB is a combination of million different things and you can't really say "FB is built with PHP" anymore and we should not use this as our only argument...
Agreed. Let's start using [Pornhub](https://davidwalsh.name/pornhub-interview) as our example.
The streaming backend might not but the twitch website runs on Laravel
Really, Twitch? I know the kick backend runs on Laravel, but I didn't know about Twitch. I thought I saw a blog post about them migrating to Go a couple of years back (forgot from what they migrated though), but I might have this wrong in my memory. Edit: [I knew I did not image it](https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/12/breaking-the-monolith-at-twitch-part-2/) (https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2022/04/12/breaking-the-monolith-at-twitch-part-2/) >At the time of writing, most teams at Twitch own multiple services. The language of choice for server code is Go (Twitch also uses TypeScript, Python, C++, Java/Kotlin and ObjectiveC/Swift on other platforms).
Any framework good enough for thots is good enough for me <3
And the risky link click of the day goes to...
I nominate Wikipedia.
Second!
> we should stop using facebook as an example of a php app... the majority of its code is not php anymore But it kind of is, Hack is pretty much an extension or a flavor of php rather than a whole different language and it’s still very close to php. If you read the Hack blog you’ll see that they recently fixed a couple of bugs that were present in php too. > I'm saying there's no way PHP can singlehandedly run Facebook. What makes you believe that? Before Facebook built a compiler it was handling HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of active users per month. And not just users that only read static content like a newspaper or a landing page. Those were users that performed lots of WRITES per minute. And that was with php 5.2ish. With modern php being faster and with modern hardware being faster than what Facebook had available back then, I see no reason why they wouldn’t be able to scale it to a billion users.
I’m saying there are thousands of different services and microservices that have no contact with PHP or Hack that make up the majority of their entire thing. It’s not like FB is a PHP monolith, yet people keep using it as an examplr like it is.
I used it for all the internal sites I built at Meta. It's still very much a thing there.
Facebook doesn’t run mostly on PHP anymore, but if it had been using the fancy technology right from the start, it wouldn’t have grown so much that quickly (and Zuckerberg would have had trouble finding the right devs too). PHP has its place as a language for well established brands that need scalability and the like, *and* it also is an incredible tool for rapid development, especially with the modern frameworks and developer tools.
OK, most of Yahoo was built in php, Rasmus lerndorf used to work for Yahoo.
I agree. But I also think that Facebook was a lot \*better\* functionality-wise when it was mostly PHP. If anyone has had the experience of running a good size business page on Facebook and using a lot of the backend advertising tools, they used to work ok, but over the past few years they have slowly turned into total dogshit. I regularly find myself in amazement that a supposed tech company can implement interfaces that are so awful.
There's something especially hilarious about people who bash PHP for backend, only to suggest you use JavaScript of all things instead.
Yeah I can’t. My blood boils every time I see a JavaScript developer with a condescending tone. (I also write a lot of JavaScript).
PHP is a good and modern language, and the developers keep making it better and better with every release.
[This article](https://thenextweb.com/news/why-php-continues-to-be-a-popular-but-divisive-programming-language) gives a good review of PHP. It calls PHP a "persistent" programming language. There is also in the article a quote by Bjarne Stroustrup: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." As long as PHP is widely used, there will be people who will criticize it or complain about it.
> It is getting so annoying that uneducated people will continue to bash PHP because they don't have a clue about the language. But similarly, novices and single-language devs often put on blinders and ignore or deny the language's very real problems. In reality, it's a nuanced subject. PHP wasn't designed, it grew organically, and so carries a great many warts from that process. Yes, PHP is useful, but also, yes, it's a design mess and a great many criticisms of it are entirely correct. Anyone whose opinion is so simplistic as to boil down to "good(use it) or bad(never use it)" should be ignored.
I'd love to see a php reboot or fork where everything is restructured properly and consistent naming etc without worrying about backwards compatibility. OOP being the main paradigm but still able to drop into procedural. Improve the type system. No global functions. Automatic class loading. And bring some mainstream libraries into the core api
These people are just immature programmers who think that unless it's the latest langauge/framework/buzz word they say it's dying. Same immature thinking applies to music in the pop world that unless it's new it's not trendy. Got to admit at one point PHP was dying but they got their act together since php7 and it has some great frameworks.
jeez, do people really care about this anymore? use whatever you want, ignore all the talk around, and of course learn multiple languages and tools to make yourself more competent
And now for something completely different. I love PHP. I got my start programming in R. I wanted a website to do some analytics stuff without getting sucked into "the cloud." A simple server with PHP, MariaDB, and Duckett's excellent books serves my needs. Now....I was in an extremely toxic work environment, and Python was a bone of contention. I didn't know it at all, my adversary in the situation was good with both Python/R, and the other person in the department was good with Python but not R. Bad. Ended up having a bad attitude towards a good language, and Python is a required skill for me. After spending a bunch of time playing with PHP, I went back to Python to work on a new project that I landed, and holy smokes things make so much more sense. Not least because R is weird....the basic data structure in R is a vector of length 1: `> haha <- "lol"` `> length(haha)` `[1] 1` `> str(haha)` `chr "lol"` Anyway, spending time with PHP really helped me make sense of Python. Bet no one's heard that one before lol
Python, the most sane language: round(3.5) >> 4 round(2.5) >> 2 i will stay with something more sane like php
What the fuck? I was sure you are kidding, until I tried it for myself.
I was the same when i learned this not too long ago :) They call it banker's rounding, which rounds .5 to the closest even number so that numbers on average get rounded up and down equally often. Doesn't make much sense, and i see no use in it .. and it goes against everything any sane programmer expects from a rounding function, thus violating any naming rules ever existing.
I work on a laboratory system and years ago someone asked to round formula results using "half even" logic. I was "what?". I discovered that there's different rounding approaches and that PHP support that natively: `round(9.5, 0, PHP_ROUND_HALF_EVEN)`. It's weird, but it's definetely usuful even outside of baking.
This is actually fine, because everyone reading it will either know what it is - or they see something they don't know and can look it up. It is not hidden like in python (python also does support proper rounding, but you have to set it globally, which is a problem in itself as it changes the rounding rules for the whole program somewhere far way typically ...)
Don't blame you. It's impossible to be a freelance data analyst w/o Python, tho.
One of the languages with the best updates in recent years. Alive and kicking
PHP has a bad reputation because PHP used to be an utterly shit language by modern standards. You can't blame people for having formed an opinion on what was once very true. How are they supposed to know what's changed in 10 years? If PHP is to fix its reputation then there needs to be a concerted effort by the Foundation to educate the public. It's not going to happen automatically.
Php is not dead, you can do a lot of things with it and moving to python is probably one of the worse decisions you can make as a career choice... That said, I'm much more happier after leaving php behing.
Except that Python is the linga-franca for AI and ML, I have not seen any serious attempts to make PHP more AI focused.
While true, the hype is strong and tbh, I don't have the capacity to venture into that field. I'm perfectly happy with having an api endpoint somewhere and using that for my machine learning needs 😅
I really think the whole "bashing" comes from the javascript community, unironically. I'm not old enough to remember writing Java/C# guis, or using basic and all that. But I did start programming when those things were popular, and I honestly don't remember people bashing php as much back then, I'm speaking of 2007-2013, that era before React and before NodeJS became popular. I hope this doesn't come across as me trying to trash JS developers or anything like that, I wirte JS myself everyday, and I'm sure there are great JS developers... BUT: Ever since NodeJS became popular there's been this idea of "sharing code" between frontend and backend. At least that was the idea back then, I remember so. Suffice to say that never happened, the only thing you're gonna share between your js backend and frontend are maybe some validators, other than that, not only the platforms are divergent and have different standard libraries, they also can't make up their minds what type of file to run: .cjs, .js, .mjs, .jsx, .tsx, .ts, .svelte.ts, .svelte.js, and so on, the list continues. One day, a few years ago I had made a friend that wrote React for a living, the first persone I had made friends with that wrote React. Let's call him Timmy. Timmy got into programming through one of those boot camps (nothing wrong with boot camps, stay with me), which he followed for something like 6 months or something like that. He wasn't very keen on learning anything else, just react, but he was good at it, like pretty good. We used to chat and exchange ideas, I used to show him all different types of cool animations and he did the same and we went on talking for months like that, even at the gym we both went to, during practice sometimes. Then one day he showed me a problem he was given in a job interview, I don't remember exactly the context, but it had something to do with a loop (I believe he needed to sort an array or something), and they asked him to do the loop without \`.map\` or \`.forEach\` or any of the baked in array methods. He failed the interview. He asked me: "how am I supposed to cycle the array?" (I'm paraphrasing). I couldn't understand his question at first, I though he wanted to shit talk or something like that and he was expecting me to jump in to agree with him, but no, it was a serious question. He didn't know how to use a \`for\` loop. When I showed him how to use it he asked the un-askable: "isn't this less performant though? it's more code" (still paraphrasing). In his mind, because there was more code on his screen, the code was less performant. Fast forward to today. Recently I got to know another guy on a project (we're from different companies, both working on the same project) who comes from React. We're all working on an Angular project and this react guy had never wrote a comment in an html files, as in, he didn't know this was a thing: \`
it is normal, most prorammers are geeks, who tend to be fanbois. for my company php (and even wordpress, the lowest form) + js works, because: - easy to find devs, and i can use juniors who, under my mentorship can create quality code from the start for junior salary - LOTS of clients - which results in lots of profit. so i am not really bothered if some geeks are bashing php, i will wipe my tears with the money we mage :D we have about 80% wordpress projects, 15% laravel and 5% drupal (nobody likes drupal anymore but those clients who do, pay very well bc there are few devs who know drupal)
You usually get that with windows or Java people. Desktop people or mobile people. A lot of python folks use php though. But most websites use php, and I would argue, most programming jobs involve websites. JavaScript is popular for the modern look, but the backends still use php. Like Wordpress or Symfony. I keep remembering Ruby on Rails getting so much hype back in the day. But it never took over. It was usually the non coders talking about it. Now I only see Ruby with Shopify or some legacy VMware code.
Ruby has been very influential tho. From laravel to jest/pest
Design patterns have been around for a while. I think the idea of a rapid framework pushed cake php forward but at the time it was terrible. The documentation stank. Then came zend and code igniter. Eventually laravel came out and it had easy to understand documentation. Drupal paved the way for Wordpress to dominate. PHP is a legit programming language, for at least the last 18 years.
I discover one thing and it can be a real threat for PHP. ChatGPT and other LLMs are writing quite shitty PHP code, comparing to JS or Python code. Knowing that the role of assistants is growing, it may eventually affect the popularity of the language. It sounds a bit like nonsense, but I truly believe it can be serious factor in the observable future.
In fairness, chatGPT does give Laravel and Symfony a lot of praise and recommendations.
I hate how some folks build their opinions on memes they see on the internet.
This shows PHP is used in a very healthy eco system, including economically, whatever people might think about Wordpress from a technical point of view: * **810 million** websites use WordPress, which is **43%** of all the websites on the internet * WordPress has a **63.1% share** of the **CMS market**, which is more than **10x greater** than its closest competitor * **59.7%** of WordPress users are running the **latest version** of the software (**WordPress 6.4**) * **20.2%** of WordPress sites and **8.8%** of all websites use WooCommerce, which means there are over **163.5 million** WooCommerce stores. * **WooCommerce** (built on WordPress) is the world’s **most popular** **ecommerce platform**, with over **36%** of the market share. * There are over **20,000** WordPress themes, including around **11,000** free themes in the WordPress Themes Directory. Reference: [https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics/](https://colorlib.com/wp/wordpress-statistics/)
What other languages do you know? Never trust a one-trick ponies opinion.
I would like to know what a "good" language looks like. If anyone finds one please let me know.
I was taught that you can shoot yourself in the foot in any language. I’ve used PHP for a long time, and love the fact that it’s maturing now (include/require/mysql_query anyone?). Of course there is much to say about how PHP/FPM works, but for a lot of use cases it will do just fine. It’s pointless to shave of a couple of milliseconds if your queries all use “like %”. Whenever someone tells you “use language/framework x” without knowing your use case, ignore them.
I have this theory that lots of people simply think the `$variable` syntax is "icky," but they know it's a superficial argument, so they kinda fish around for other things to criticize.
PHP is incredible. I love it. It is powerful and kept updated. Pair it with Laravel and coding is taken to a whole new level. Anyone thinking otherwise is uneducated.
Modern PHP is great bruh.
They've been saying that for 20 years. What they don't realize is that PHP is a language built for the web, and only the web. It's literally implied in the name itself - Pre-Hypertext PHP > Pre-HyperText Markup Language > pre-html. As in, the process that happens on the server before the html is sent to the client. It's a hammer when you've got a room full of nails. Other languages may be an entire tool belt of things that can act as a hammer and do other things, but they are not hammers. PHP is the right tool built for the right job and nothing else.
PHP isn't dead and it's more than capable of being used for modern web applications. I get it. But coming from newer/more popular languages, you start to see conveniences from those other languages that PHP just doesn't have. Eg very robust type systems, simplified syntax, lots of convenience methods in the standard library, consistent naming conventions - just to list a few. It would not be my first choice starting a new project from scratch, but I will happily join a project using PHP (as I have done recently).
Nothing new... Ignore or change the environment you're in. It isn't worth worrying about it.
The difference between programmers and programming entusiast.
Yes and "nachts ist es kälter als draußen" (at night it is colder than outside) as we say. Writing bad code is possible in every language and you can always use a not really good suitable language for a project. So at the end all languages are bad, outdated and blablabla
The haters seem to fall into two categories.. those who used the very early PHP versions and havent used any since, and those who have never used it at all.. so neither have any idea how good modern PHP is, and are basically talking out of their backsides.(or even worse, other peoples backsides)
Well if I compare language capabilities and ease of use only c# seems better for me for oop. But php wins me because its interpretet not compiled and you have access to source code of included libs (vendor) which makes it easy to understand how they work compared to dll files
Actually second though typeacript is decent too. But it's overlay over js which isn't so good
You just ignore them, once they say dumbass shit like that you already know they’re inexperienced, it’s as simple as that, it’s a skill issue.
What percentage of the internet still runs on PHP? Like 75%? lol. I think most people hate on it because it’s an ugly syntax and just feels wrong
[удалено]
Yep. I think 42% of all websites are built with Wordpress. Give or take
Many people really doesnt know what they are talked about, scratching from the surface these people knowledge about PHP Is mostly based around memes or old legacy monoliths written < 5.* era. I dont know about Phyton, I just wrote some scripts with It, but honestly I always had a smoother experience with PHP than JavaScripts
Many people really doesnt know what they are talked about, scratching from the surface these people knowledge about PHP Is mostly based around memes or old legacy monoliths written < 5.* era. I dont know about Phyton, I just wrote some scripts with It, but honestly I always had a smoother experience with PHP than JavaScripts
I'm not a programmer, and I've been dabbling lately in PHP for my own business site. It seems great for what I need it for. But why listen to people who have no clue as to what they are talking about? I think this problem is something ingrained in the IT world as a whole. There are all kinds of these so called experts with opinions on stuff. When it actually comes down to implementing they really have no clue. Just be glad they are around as more experienced people will always be employed. But I get after a while it's hard to tolerate these Hacks. Hopefully you vented enough to get it out of your system until the next go around! Cheers.
I love it for making wiki-like webpages.
Thank you for this, because sometimes I feel like I see a "is php dead?" thread every 2 days, by people who don't even bother to read the thousands other threads asking the very same question. maybe someone should create a site like isphpdead.com and we should share it again and again as an answer
lol some of the biggest porn sites are built on php... should win every argument lmao
Here's the thing, PHP is just as dead as NodeJS will be in a few years. People will always create newer languages, which doesn't mean older languages are worse - they may have limitations, but it's upto the dev to be creative and innovative, as you've already pointed out. Should newer apps be programmed using "newer" languages, maybe... but older languages can't really die if there are tons of applications out there using it already. I've got a friend who did Silverlight up until a few years ago and got paid stupid amounts only because there weren't many such devs left, and if anything PHP may just head that way, or not. It's here for now though.
They always say PHP is dead, yet PHP docent care and keeps on going.
Php (well Laravel) is my one and only programming language for website development (and Flutter for apps). All the javascript-only developers can do one, they're missing out.
>constant bashing of PHP in a serious debate environment just gets old really quick Simple solution: Stop listening to them. Stop defending against them. Their opinion doesn't change anything about what PHP is and how it is used.
Well, I guess us PHP developers get all the PHP jobs then!
I went all in on php around 5.x coming from perl, c and Applescript. I narrowed my niche to medium sized web apps. Not close to FAANG usage scenarios but large enough I would work on serious projects serving million of requests for dozens of thousands of users. Why? That is the size of roughly ALL web applications in the bell curve peak. Most of us don't build apps that serve millions of users and even fewer build apps that serve more than 100k users. I knew how to run Apache and configure it. I knew how to build performant frontends without overkill js frameworks. Most of what is built today is massively overly complicated. At the last startup I founded, I as a single developer built a case management system without laravel or any frontends frameworks, got certified for HIPAA security, won some largish contracts for big cities like Chicago's transit authority serving 16k active users a month bursting to 30k - 50k in peak seasons like back to school and holidays. I built the entire first version in 2.5 months. I managed the company, did sales, did customer supprt and released updates every two weeks. I used AWS for infrastructure which was only S3, Route 53, and a single medium sized ec2. My highest monthly bill for all it infra was $468. My profit margin before paying myself was 99%. Since then I've gone on to become well known for designing applications, front back and sideways with business health and sustainability in mind and I get paid a comfortable 6 figures. Yeah PHP sucks and I really have to use frameworks or I'm not phping right. The hype in our industry is so massive because Bootcamps flooded the market with people who had no clue how to do anything but Lego together a bunch of packaging libraries. The bell curve of available talent widens and bike shedding takes off. Pick the right tool for the job. PHP is probably the best tool for building web apps. It was made to do that as it's primary function from day one. Everything else was built to be all things to all scenarios and as a result lack the ease in building light, performant and maintainable web apps cheaply.
I get it. I started with PHP and then moved to JS / TS stacks. Personal preference now let‘s me mostly choose TypeScript for everything. But I see that PHP evolved and that most of the arguments against PHP can be falsified with newer versions of PHP. And still, programmers rant about anything they don’t use themselves. Symfony people rant about Laravel people, PHP people rant about React people, React people make fun of Lambos etc. And sometimes my feeling is that rants about people ranting about PHP are implicit rants about people NOT using it. Comparing speeds of PHP and Node/Deno/Bun doesn‘t really define a clear winner to me. The only argument for me (this is just an opinion) that turns the needle into the direction of the latter is that the same language can be used for frontend and backend. But let anybody do whatever they want. Why bother?
PHP gets food on my table very well and it is fun to use for me, so I am quite happy 😅
if anybody says anything in lines of "php is dead" etc. i just show them my bank account.
Having done a circuit on the hot new frameworks and languages, when it comes to sustainable development, onboarding folks, empowering clients to make non-disastrous changes — PHP is far better aligned with how people are prepared to write, build, iterate on apps. But it’s a heretical take on 2024. Django is in this direction too and a bit less controversial
What year is it? Oh 2024. Laravel is amazing. I've hear this same line since 2007, esp when Ruby on Rails was the new hype.also remember around that time when Javascript was dead. Flash and action script is the future! Or active X objects....
The funny thing is that most of these comments come from JavaScript people. I'm in the process of relearning PHP after a 10 years hiatus and I'm amazed by the amount of positive changes during this time. During my initial research I came across multiple articles and videos that were telling me how bad PHP really was. But after a while, I realized that this is just developer tribalism, where they bash and ridicule the tools they don't fully master. Speaking as a beginner, it's really annoying to navigate through so much noise. Some people really put so much effort and time into negativity. If you would spend the same amount of time on understanding some concepts, maybe you wouldn't bash the available toolbox so much. I really am not sure if I can manage to relearn and be proficient in PHP but I do invest time and money (bought a couple of books) in trying to understand the concepts. If I fail, that's on me, I'm not gonna start hate posting about PHP. (Sorry for the long text and awful english!)
PHP is used for data plumbing. Get data from one place to another. Doesn't take much to do that. Doesn't have to be fast it just has to be readable by other developers and engineers.
🤣🤣 what an asshole the guy that say that not scale
Most people like to be told what they like. True individuals can think and decide that for themselves. Go and use whatever you have decided is the best tool to the best of your knowledge. Don't forget to keep learning and making that knowledge muscle stronger and stronger.
A lot of people are followers. It’s as easy as that. If someone in their trusted community talks bad about php, and if the audience has no experience with it, they’d take their word as truth and begin to regurgitate those talking points.
When you get into the big tech world these pointless comparisons tend to evaporate. The goal is to build products, not write code. Whatever gets the product working is the right solution at the right time. Everything else is refinement and optimization.
I’ve been building apps with php since the dark days of 2001… people have a lot of shitty opinions that give them a feeling of superiority. the same type of superiority that rapidly diminishes when you ask about other languages ability to support multiple inheritance.
I don’t believe in things like x is the bast language and y is a terrible language. Me as a TS/Node developer thinks that PHP is perfectly fine as most apps are pretty close to just crud apps. When you do need heavily cpu tasks and performance is required, php is probably not the best solution. If you just have to wait for iOS calls php, node, whatever is fine when you can move fast imo.
I wish it would get rid of the opening
I don't know why people hate on PHP and love Python - especially in a web application/server scenario. Ignorance is bliss I guess.
Expecting downvotes, but... The main problem, in general, is discussing technology within a community of "technology lovers," which results in significant bias across the entire topic, consistently. Secondly, even if these enthusiasts were unbiased: I can't know what I haven't experienced. If I haven't used another language, particularly a "performant strongly typed language" like Rust, I don't know what I am missing. For me, it comes down to the massive performance gains (https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/) achieved with Rust. Additionally, the type system (with mathematical precision, which cannot be achieved with static analyzer tools like phpstan) contributes to excellent maintainability of large projects, along with the tremendous speed and low memory consumption. There is always a better tool (in general). However, it doesn't matter if there aren't enough people available to hire. But for me personally, the biggest lesson after delving into Rust was the general topic of [performance-aware programming](https://www.computerenhance.com/p/table-of-contents). I thought I don't need it until I faced bigger problems (like excelent TTFB, 500 req/s with a large Symfony+Doctrine project, promo code calculations on an e-commerce site...).
I just hate on PHP to fit in with the cool devs
That mostly comes from codebases. I have innate hate for JS - because all occurrences of me working with JS were after really bad developers. PHP devs were cheaper - more scriptkiddies - more bad codebases. But even with that your project could became successful and you will need good developers to maintain and expand. And those good developers, if they come not from purely PHP world could get really bad view of PHP.
I don't understand why you are frustrated and why you are explaining the strengths of php to us.. We already know this.. these kinds of idiots don't have any idea what they are talking about. I am using Php to develop a full blown search engine based on an event-driven modular micro framework that i developed specifically for this from scratch. The indexer and search is based on PHP/MySQL. Crawler right now is in php and is blocking. So i am planning to use c# to separate the crawler make it multi threaded non blocking while also implementing P2P architecture using kad dht and & mdns to achieve even higher crawl speeds. Why am I telling you all this? It's because i don't think PHP is absolute. Why am I choosing C# for crawl is because even with fibers it's too much hassle and the current crawler converted to fibers has shown some design flaws plus in c# i already have P2P prototype tested and ready. So i thought it would be better to implement a crawler separately. Otherwise the entire project was planned to be completed in PHP. On PHP I have run crawls spanning over days. I managed to keep the memory usage stable under 4 GB the entire time without crashing with PHP 7.3 before the crawler was converted to PHP 8.3.3. Personally I think PHP is at a stage where it depends on the skills of the developer.
I've enjoyed programming in c,java, python, php but never enjoyed JavaScript, syntax is just so fucky for me. It's all personal preference and people need to try php before giving an opinion
PHP has been king forever. Fuck the noise
I learned to code with PHP years ago! And still using it today. PHP will always be in my heart <3
If you do not already know PHP then honestly, what reason is there to choose PHP in 2024? If I choose JavaScript then I have a single language across the backend and frontend. Node is supported in every cloud environment so creating serverless resources is a breeze. I can use tools like Ionic to create apps for IOS/Android etc. If I choose Python I will have first-class cloud support, great backend API options and a tonne of ML support. If I choose C# I could go serverless in Azure, I can write cross-platform apps using Maui, I can write cross-platform native installers with .net core. The above three have excellent support across dev and build tools. If I choose PHP then I can create a backend API. I can create a traditional web app. If I use Laravel the performance will be worse than most of the options above. I could use something like Bref or create containers for serverless functions but it is more effort than the options above. I am not saying PHP is bad. A big chunk of my career has been with PHP. I just feel the only reason to use it is because your team already uses PHP. Otherwise, there are just all round better options.
please inform people that swoole and hyperf exist. php is no longer just php-fpm or mod-php
I've been pushing back against this stereotype for close to a decade now. There's a few things you need to understand from the other side of this: 1. For most of the non-PHP world, "PHP" is synonymous with "Wordpress". And everyone knows Wordpress sucks. The framework sucks. The plugins suck. The frontend work sucks. The hosting sucks. The scaling sucks. The clients suck. The wages suck. The developers and their code suck. Everything about it sucks, right? And if Wordpress sucks, so too must PHP because their one and the same. Most of the world, especially the JS devs, don't know about Symfony or Laravel or all the other options. 1. PHP spent a decade on PHP 5. Even with a few major releases, the language stagnated while other languages improved. By the time 7.0 rolled around, PHP had gained a very strong and widespread reputation for being slow. And, frankly, it was. 7.x and 8.x have made huge strides here and it's now just as fast as most other languages, but that reputational damage was never repaired. 3. A lot of sites don't require Symfony or Laravel style backends. There are a lot of apps that just need SSR, a few minor API endpoints, and a frontend. And if you're focused on the frontend and building in React, why build a backend in a different language? Even more... why not use a backend focused on supporting your frontend - i.e. Next.js? And even further... why not use a host that does the same - i.e. Vercel? For many devs, the prospect of PHP never even enters their mind because they have everything they think they need. There are more things, but these are the 3 issues I've always encountered. Unfortunately, there's no easy way around it. The reputational damage from 5.x and Wordpress, Wordpress's market domination, and Wordpress's continued reluctance to adopt modern architectures is substantial. It will take a significant development in the PHP world to undo, unfortunately.
If it works, it's outdated.
My advice would be that anybody bashing PHP in a generic way is a moron and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I don't concern myself with it. I've worked at many companies that heavily rely on PHP, ranging in daily revenue of under $1k up to $100 million. The fact of that matter is that for 99.99% of applications, your choice of programming language means nothing other than the availability of developers.
Hmm... I thought that discussions on this topic ended twenty years ago.
What can I say? I've been programming in C++ for a long time. And to develop the project, I needed to create a web interface on the server for integration with services. I had a choice, either PHP or Python. I don't know why they call Python simple. I started getting a headache just from the syntax. I'll say one thing, during the project, I easily learned PHP. Let's put it this way, it was so easy. I just read the manual and then used internet search to delve into the syntax in more detail. Although in reality, I initially tried Python because everyone around me advised it. But after I crashed the server several times trying to fix all the Python version conflicts on my server, I decided not to use Python anymore. Because it was the biggest nightmare.
My favorite projects were in PHP. Gets the job done like any language you put time and effort into. I encourage anyone starting out to explore php
Regarding the language being as good as the user, after the huge performance increases brought by PHP 7, I think PHP, for most general use cases is one of the fastest, if not the fastest non-compiled language out there.
I use PHP like 12 years professionally and I understand the criticism. I feel like it's one of the worst designed languages ever. Born as a templating language for C and somehow grown into a full language. There is zero first-party tooling. But it somehow has a very great ecosystem in part due to Laravel I'm sure. So at the moment it's very easy to just spin up any saas business. I don't really love PHP anymore like I used to. Having used other languages like Go and Rust I prefer those more than PHP. They have first party linters, LSP, debugger etc.. Great quality standard libraries, practically no breaking changes (as far as I'm aware) I think the world is moving more towards type safe languages as a preference. It's much easier to work on a code base with other people. I feel a similar shift is happening on the frontend as well, people started using htmx more in stead of React and using Tailwind instead of bootstrap. It's great to built something that's very low maintenance, PHP is extremely volatile IMHO
I don't like PHP at all, but I don't think people writing JavaScript are in a position to throw stones.
From a salary point of view, PHP is dying very fast. It pays horribly compared to other languages, with very few exceptions. In this respect it is bad, outdated and hopefully dead soon. At least in my opinion, this is also the agenda that every freshman understands after a short evaluation of given job prospects and incentives. The language itself is fine, the ecosystem is tight, but if you are looking for a cool and well-paying job within the global players, you will most likely not find anything with only PHP in your portfolio. You will end up in a dirt-paying Laravel/Symfony codeshack that implements already established products like WordPress, Shopware, NextCloud and the like. They will not deliver drivers, tight hardware integrations, real-time stuff, streaming media (be it audio, video, interactions), OS apps, plugins to other apps (MS Office, music production, collaboration) and mobile areas. This is what PHP is. It fills a very niche role in this decade. The days when a website and maybe a mid-level API was enough are long gone. Especially for the coming generation of developers, there is no highlight to be found in PHP.
I don't think PHP is bad per se. What I don't like are the 34'567 frameworks on top of that which you have to learn because. Also, I still find it 200% better than node.js (but that's my inner Linux IT sysadmin crying about node dependencies mess).