[Lazare]

I feel you. I'm currently at a startup that, somewhat by accident, ended up writing their backend in PHP.

Modern PHP is actually fine; it's largely avoided the issues perl has; adoption of the latest versions is quite high, and it's...fine. Not the best, not the worst, broadly comparable to other languages, and a far, far, far cry from what most people may think of when they hear "PHP". My last job used Node, the one before that used Python; I have personal preferences, but at the end of the day they're just tools, it's all fine. The "PHP: a fractal of bad design" blog post actually made a big impact on the community, and shocking number of the issues listed there have been solved, with rapid active progress ongoing. (Yes, I know, it still has issues, and people still hate it. No need to comment to let me know.)

And yet...

...there's a big chunk of the PHP community that just really isn't on board with any of this. Every time the core devs release a new language feature, vocal critics complain about how the language is becoming more "enterprisey" or "like Java". Even on the core dev team, when they vote about fixing some crazy broken feature of the language from the bad old days, a vocal minority is always against it. The language (thankfully) has not stayed still since 2002, but people are trying.

And of course, when we advertise to hire devs, if we say we're looking for "PHP devs", we end up flooded with applications from people who basically know how to install and configure plugins for PHP based CMSes, or from "senior devs" who have been hacking together procedural PHP scripts for 20+ years and have zero knowledge of software engineering principles, unit testing, etc. We've ended up hiring python devs to work on a php code base, not because no php devs are out there, but just because the community is so....weird. There are good engineers who happen to sometimes use PHP, but they rarely (if ever) identify as "PHP devs".

I dislike the JS ecosystem and it's constant churn and cult of the new, but sometimes you run across the reverse problem too.

[adolfojp]

I heard the "PHP is becoming like Java" argument in 2005 when PHP 5 came out. I'm surprised to hear it's still a thing.

Funny enough I heard the same thing about JavaScript about 5 years ago when ES6 came out.

[Lazare]

> I'm surprised to hear it's still a thing.

Ha, if anything I think it's intensified. A current focus is on adding support for annotations (aka attributes from C#), which will be strictly opt-in and replace an ugly pattern currently widely used in PHP land of using docblocks to store them and then parsing them out at run time. "Hey, people keep storing these things in comments, lots of other languages have them as a real feature, let's do the same and make things saner and more efficient."

Simple right? But no, it's actually been quite controversial, and by no means just due to bikeshedding about syntax. Here's a selection of quotes (all highly upvoted) from a recent announcement on the PHP subreddit announcing that the feature has been accepted for PHP 8.0 and linking to a detailed document explaining the use case in painful detail:

"What problem is this trying to solve? I don’t think I’m a fan." "Not sure if I'm a fan. [...] IMO it got way out of hand in Java." "How about no? What does it solve that you can not already program with PHP. If other languages are any indication, its one of those changes that WILL get misused from here to high end." "yeah no thx"

[petre]

Haha no. Php 5 has proper class definitions. Php 7 adds a spaceship operator, use declarations (yay Perl language features), return type declarations etc. Js was still prototype based the last time I've checked.

[sergeykish]

It was self inflicted damage.

PHP 5 felt like two distinct languages - PHP 4 and Java parts. PHP 4 was ok for its tasks, Java parts bolted on top, very unnatural, no continuation. In essence community was subverted. Other prominent examples - pulse audio and systemd. Compare it with Perls "bless" - looks so elegant and natural.

Some people do not buy that change, stick to origins and it makes sense. There was a conference talk "most programmers don't change their habits, wait until they die". It takes many years to burn and bury those who remember. It is said Moses wandered with his people for 40 years (until no those who were slaves left).

If Java was bolted on top of Ruby today I would not stay. At least because Java is better than Java bolted on Ruby.

You have valid point - stuck in the middle there is no way but forward, burn the past. They have point - someone destroyed the language they liked and you is one of them. No one shames bash scripts for lack of engineering principles, unit testing etc. Please do not disrespect them, it is not their fault.

[blablabla123]

Yeah a programming language can have such a positive momentum, but the community is also a thing. I think the currently popular programming languages have really healthy communities, go for linting, clean code and modern solutions.

I always avoided PHP but on one job I worked with it after the company was bought. So I had to maintain a billing script written in PHP to be called from the command line. It was running on a huge FreeBSD server that would fail booting oftentimes and in the script you had to change the start and end date each month manually. Of course there was no version control although I was told there was a second copy of that server in case this one failed completely. I wrote the guy (the then CTO) a few times emails with questions but he never responded. Eventually I ported the code to Go with unit tests. I get the point that there is PHP 7 with modern frameworks but those are useless without adopting modern coding and deployment practices.

[throwaway777555]

My experience has been the opposite. I work in a PHP shop and with each new version update, a handful of us are excited about the new changes that get made to the language. Our DevOps team has been on top of keeping our servers running the latest production-ready versions of PHP. So many of the refinements are a welcome change. I'm eager for stronger type hinting and other features that are still coming down the pipe.

[Lazare]

No, that's our experience too. We're excited by the changes, eager for each new release, and enjoy being able to write solid code without the language getting in the way (much). When 8.0 drops we'll probably have cake.

...the issue is the community, and (especially) the pool of applicants we get. It may be different where you are, but around here you advertise for a "senior backend dev", and you get a bunch of people with solid experience in, mostly, Python showing up, with maybe a sprinkling of .NET and Java. (Two of the biggest IT employers in town use Python, which skews things a bit, I know.) But you advertise for a "senior PHP dev", and you get all sorts, but (so far) no one we'd consider hiring. (Let me put it this way: The next time one of the "PHP devs" we shortlist turns out to have ever written a functioning unit test will be the first time. And these are people with years of experience, applying for a senior role...)