[sacks2k]

"I do think that one of the big problems for PHP is that people who voluntarily do PHP instead of something else are immediately suspect"

I write lots of PHP for work and for most of my personal projects. Learning other languages is just syntax, when you know the core concepts.

I once converted a personal project over to Python 3.X in a couple of weeks and it was much slower and took more memory than the PHP counterpart, so I scrapped it.

"However, most PHP I run into is not modern"

This may be the case for you, but I've worked with lots of companies that built their apps using PHP and most are modern.

"but I can't really imagine doing it myself just because of all the flashbacks to code that parses query parameters and calls the database in the middle of a templated for loop"

I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.

I think many here on HN are living in a bubble where most companies use cool new frameworks and are looked down upon for their stack choices.

I haven't been out of work in the past two decades, and I work almost exclusively with PHP code bases. I suppose I should be happy for all of this language snobbery, because I make a very good living and haven't spent more than a few days between gigs.

[earthboundkid]

> I'm sure there were many poor practices with other languages 20+ years ago.

I agree with most of what you wrote, but not this. Code written in PHP from the 5 and before era was bad in a unique way. Before it came bad VB and now there is a deluge of bad React. That’s what happens when a language is popular with inexperienced programmers. But bad PHP was bad and insecure by default, which led to a ton of security bugs. The only thing comparable is C, which has had tons of buffer overflow security bugs—but those were written by pros. ;-) I can’t think of anything else web facing with so many problems with SQL injection and string escaping. The problem was that making a webpage by naive string interpolation is a bad idea, but it seemed like a good idea and it’s what PHP did best and why it was so popular. PHP was lucky to be the wrong paradigm at the right time to take off like a rocket.

Modern PHP is MVC-ish like everything else, but without the simplicity of stupid string interpolation, it can’t attract users like bad PHP used to.

[potta_coffee]

I think the parent comment is just describing some of the perceptions they've seen about PHP. I've done PHP work, but I've noticed the same perception. Also in my area, there's a lot of PHP work, but it's generally much lower paid. I know a lot of tech people here, and some of them are writing really modern PHP - for much lower pay than a .NET developer at a comparable job. It's definitely possible to do great work in PHP, and it's also definitely perceived (rightly or wrongly) at least in some circles to not be awesome.