[ponyfleisch]

While reading i was thinking "..but that all makes sense for any project that's larger than a few hundred lines.." and thought the author was just ignorant and needlessly cynical.

But at the end of the article, he makes a good point:

Disputes like “Why do I need PHP if there’s Java?” have become more frequent nowadays. I don’t know who’s in the right, Holly Wars are tricky. But each dispute has an argument in favor of PHP — it’s easy for beginners. To my mind, this argument isn’t valid anymore, which is exactly what I was trying to say in this article.

The notion of PHP as a beginner-friendly language has in my opinion been a harmful one for a while now. There are still people writing old school PHP apps, and there is the (mildly displeasing) wordpress ecosystem. But for anything serious, Symfony is invaluable. And the gap between old school PHP to modern PHP is almost the same as the one between old school PHP and Java/Spring/Hibernate, which is kind of what Symfony/Doctrine is cloning anyway. Plus if you do Java, you don't get the stigma of being in the same category as a professional wordpress template tweaker.

[raziel2p]

I like to argue that you can start off using PHP as a scripting language with a single index.php file, then maybe learn to use some of the simple frameworks like Slim (though even that has become more complicated recently), then move from that to Symfony or the like. This is a point the original author misses. If you introduce beginners in PHP to Symfony and SPAs from the start obviously they're going to have a bad time.

[ponyfleisch]

I'm not convinced that this approach flattens the learning curve significantly. The concepts are different, and when you're at the end of that journey and look back, you'll find that you spent a large amount of time unlearning things. That is if you ever get there. It's easy getting stuck on local maxima when avoiding steep learning curves.

In other words, old school PHP and modern PHP are two vastly different beasts with few commonalities.

There is no way past learning the basics (OOP, patterns, proper architecture), by deferring that in favour of an easier start you're only lengthening the journey.