[francislavoie]

I disagree a lot with this article's opinions on PHP. It sounds like coming at it from the perspective of someone who hasn't used it in over a decade. Modern PHP with frameworks is just about as good as it gets for web development.

Edit: oh lol, this was written in 2002, alright, that confirms that.

[hardwaresofton]

> I disagree a lot with this article's opinions on PHP. It sounds like coming at it from the perspective of someone who hasn't used it in over a decade. Modern PHP with frameworks is just about as good as it gets for web development.

hard disagree, but I'd love to learn more of the things that PHP is good at when compared to other frameworks and languages. Rails & Django are the frameworks to beat in terms of completeness and productivity, Flask/Sinatra for python/ruby flavored micro frameworks, NodeJS for massive concurrency and parallelism (Node does support threads as well as subprocesses) and large (sometimes sketchy) ecosystem and ease of contributions. There are the compiled languages as well with various advantages -- single binary deploy, speed, error avoidance with compile time type declaration/inference, etc.

What does modern PHP and a framework (like Laravel? what is popular in the space these days?) do better than it's contemporaries do? IIRC HHVM which seemed to be a bright spot (?) was abandoned by FB... Would love to hear about PHP's bright spots from a PHP enthusiast.

[donatj]

PHP was built to parallelize requests, out of the box. It will use all of your cores automatically with no work on the developers part. It’s seemingly hard to find benchmarks comparing _modern_ versions of PHP not behind Apache to Node but once you get Apache out of the way of PHP7 the performance of modern PHP screams.

HHVM as you mentioned lost momentum when PHP7 largely met or surpassed its performance. That’s not a bad thing though, it just wasn’t hugely necessary anymore. The major upside is everyone gets the boost now, whereas HHVM was a nightmare to setup if you were not Facebook.

Beyond that, I truly believe the stateless nature of PHP requests is by far the easiest mental model to work with. As cross-request state is held exclusively and explicitly elsewhere (Redis, Memcache, SQL), it’s remarkably easy to reason about at scale.

This makes it easy to scale! Just throw another server on the load balancer and everything works. I work on a relatively large educational product, and we auto-balance up to 30+ servers during the week to handle a couple million users sending continuous streams of data, down to a minimum of 2 on weekends. It’s taken almost no consideration on the developers parts because of PHPs naturally stateless clean slate per page load model.

We also have a fair bit of Go in production, largely for CPU intensive operations. I love Go and use it for the majority of my newer personal projects. The major advantage to PHP that keeps it our primary language is the speed at which I can develop and iterate. The difference save/refresh vs save/recompile/restart/refresh makes in speed is not to be underestimated.

Myself as well as our lead dev have been using Go since before 1.x and we both still agree that PHP is better for rapid prototyping as well as just generally getting things out the door quickly.

[hardwaresofton]

> HHVM as you mentioned lost momentum when PHP7 largely met or surpassed its performance. That’s not a bad thing though, it just wasn’t hugely necessary anymore. The major upside is everyone gets the boost now, whereas HHVM was a nightmare to setup if you were not Facebook.

I had no idea this was why!

Thanks for sharing this insight, great to hear the rationale of teams that are choosing PHP for good reasons these days, the points you've made definitely make sense.

[blueterminal]

I work mostly with Django at my work. I still choose Lumen / Laravel for my personal projects. Both Django and Laravel are amazing but I'm still more effective with Laravel. It has way more functionality out of the box.