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by memracom 3195 days ago
I think that these changes mean the death knell for PHP in any version, for small companies. There is still a place for Hack or PHP7 in very large operations, but startups, and businesses that run at smaller scale, really should walk away from PHP entirely as soon as possible.

Two reasonable directions to choose are Python Three with a framework like Flask (lighweight) or Django (heavy duty). Or go to the JVM with something like Grails framework (heavy duty) on the Groovy language. Ratpack is a lightweight framework for Groovy and there is also an interesting option to use Vaadin 8 which lets you put your GUI code into the main app rather than writing separate Javascript code.

When making your decision, be sure to consider the huge JVM ecosystem that integrates quite easily with Groovy including development tools like Jenkins and SOAPUI that can be scripted with Groovy. And the Python side also has a fairly extensive ecosystem of libraries as well.

The skill level of Python and Java/Groovy developers tends to be higher than PHP which has always attracted people who would learn just enought to get by.

The software dev community has gone through an explosion of diversity in the past 2 decades and that has enabled a lot of experimentation with new ways of doing this. There is a lot of good in this. But now we are in a period of contraction. Some of this is manifested in the spread of functional capabilities via libraries such as reactive extensions and functional features being added to languages like Java and Javascript. Another manifestation is the fading of PERL from prominence, and this is now happening to PHP as well as Ruby.

This is evolution. Embrace it or face your personal extinction as a software developer.

5 comments

> This is evolution. Embrace it or face your personal extinction as a software developer.

Woah there Mr Hyperbole.

The reason PHP is still in use, and not dead or dying, is that it's one of the simplest languages to write server-side code in.

That means it's remarkably easy to hack something together quickly, with no compilation step to get in the way.

Unless that changes in a drastic fashion, projects will continue to get started in PHP, and PHP's user base will continue to grow, and (hopefully) the language will continue to improve to accommodate that growth.

If you believe this, then you are very bad at predicting the future. I'm very bad at that too. But I can assure you, "better languages" don't win the war. PHP has a lot of software out there and what's going to have it leading HHVM. You will have the "cutting edge" folks give HHVM a shot, but all the practical folks don't care. The only way HHVM will have a chance will be to be 100% backwards compatible.
> go to the JVM with something like Grails framework

No-one's upgrading from Grails version 2 to version 3, or starting new projects in it any more.

Apache Groovy's good for scripting on the JVM -- just don't build any systems with it. Systems on the JVM should be built in languages that were statically typed from the ground up, like Java, Kotlin and Scala. Static typing was grafted on to Groovy in version 2, and not used very much, hence no-one's sure about its quality. Best use Groovy for glue code and build scripts only, which was its original purpose back in 2003.

> The skill level of Python and Java/Groovy developers tends to be higher than PHP

Now this is starting to look like an advert for Groovy, assuming all Java programmers also use Groovy, and associating it with Python in contrast to PHP.

Bottom line is people will need websites and most people want to develop them in a way that is easy. You are talking all these languages that are overkill for websites and patterns that most web developers wont even use. Functional programming, really in web dev? If you start thinking like that then before you figure out the latest and greatest design pattern you will end up using someone in wordpress has finished the website. Companies are in the product shipping business, not the hipster coding business.
No offense but python is being eaten alive by nodejs, golang, crystal, OCaml, Julia, R, matlab etc. and Java is being eaten alive by kotlin, swift, etc.. I mean you're basically wrong about everything and making totally arbitrary baseless claims.