Ask HN: Is PHP Dead or Useless?

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6 points by sam-a 2447 days ago

I see a lot of negative comments from people online and very little interest from people about PHP. I'm not sure what the deal is and i'm a little confused. There're more hypes around Python, Java, Go than PHP, even though PHP is very good language on it's own.

I really love and enjoy PHP, i've been building amazing apps in PHP and using the Laravel framework too. What i also like about PHP is the OOP design i can use when building.

Is PHP dead like some people claim? Is it not gonna be useful in the future? Are there no mission critical systems built with PHP?

3 comments

noir_lord 2447 days ago

There is a lot of hate for PHP out there, much of it based on people either jumping on a band wagon or assuming that PHP hasn't changed since PHP4.

Modern PHP written against 7 and leveraging all the excellent tooling that exists is no worse than any other production code base.

As for PHP dying, not for a long time, there are vast amounts of systems out there still running PHP.

Much of the apparent loss of interest isnt because PHP numbers are declining it's because languages and frameworks exploded in numbers.

A case of a medium size fish in a much bigger pond.

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stephen82 2447 days ago

Those who claim PHP is dead should bookmark this link[1] and pay a visit every week or so for the sake of ranting...and decide how "dead" this language is!

Also not a single language becomes dead, at least in programming; it just becomes obsolete and not used, that's all.

Maybe they need to say the same thing for COBOL that "still runs the world in traditional banking, lots of large scale government systems, insurance and health care". [2]

    [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all
    [2] https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-is-COBOL-still-being-used-in-2019

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fetbaffe 2446 days ago

PHP is a beginner friendly language, thus a lot of beginner mistakes are done in PHP, therefore a lot of programmers think that PHP is bad language. Common fallacy.

PHP is also a web language, very closely connected to HTML & related technologies, thing is that a lot of programmers today actually hate the web, that is why so many (frontend) frameworks try to hide the web technologies as much as possible.

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