[osrec]

It actually makes me really happy to see more positive comments on a thread about PHP. It is an incredible workhorse, and doesn't get the credit it deserves.

I'm often amused by developers that revile PHP, while going on to use another language, which suffers from a similar set of problems to PHP, oftentimes with poorer performance and more complex toolchains.

PHP deserves a little more love, imo.

[bsdubernerd]

I always used and use PHP because it gets the s$$$ done.

But truth be told, the hate is deserved. It never was a particularly efficient language, which might not matter that much, but it was riddled with gotchas, warts and horrible solutions to many technical and social problems.

Today PHP is faster than many alternatives, many of its warts got fixed, but I cannot brush off the fact that it's still based on a poorly-designed base and runtime library.

I'm still using PHP when it makes sense, in the same way I'm still using perl where it makes sense.

[kyriakos]

I agree with both statements, it gets shit done but has its rough edges. Its improving though and I doubt there's a perfect programming language out there. At the end of the day what matters are results and how quickly you went from idea to production and PHP is one of the good ones for that matter.

[87zuhjkas]

I think "rough edges" is an understatement. It has serious design flaws and inconsistencies which are probably never going to be fixed due to backwards compatibility. It's like C++ now, tons of language features are added over the years but non of them is able to repair the language, similar to a game of Jenga, the tower will collapse eventually.

[stunt]

PHP has its special place for every developer that works on web. And it got all recent improvements thanks to all those criticisms. I think every popular language receives criticism and that's just fine.

I'm happy that the language is evolving and there is a strong ecosystem with quality libraries and developers unlike what it used to be 5 years ago.

I've been doing several languages (Scala, and Typescript. also Go recently) in last few years. But, I still follow PHP ecosystem closely and I'd definitely choose it for my next web startup. It's just 10x faster and ultimately cheaper to build web with PHP. That's why there are so many big success stories that started with PHP even in areas that you wouldn't believe. Surprisingly enough, not only web! One of Cloudflare's founders said on an interview that their back-end was written in PHP and it was used for a long time. That's one of the things that you think no one would do.

[tutfbhuf]

A static (serverless) website hosted on something like github pages or S3 paired with some API calls to an nodejs application running on a single core vm instance, both behind cloudflare, is also extremely cheap and should be able to easily beat php in terms of performance/costs ratio.

[stunt]

Yes you are right. There are a few really good frameworks like Gatsby and NEXT for building static websites since last few years. JS/NodeJS/TS development cost is also quite moderate and good.

JS ecosystem still lacks good reliable vendors and that holds some companies away from it. Surprisingly it's holding up really well even though must of the packages are maintained by individual contributors.

[tutfbhuf]

We often have comments like "actually php is not that bad" and then people might think let's give it another try, only to find out that they came across all over the same quirks of language (design) and runtime behavior again. I think the main problem of php is that it's so inconsistent. I would rather prefer a bad language if it would happen to be at least very consistently so.