[GongOfFour]

I started my career as a PHP dev in 2003 (mysql/smarty/adodb ftw) and I became a Rails dev around 06. Since then I have, for various reasons, switched back and forth between PHP and Ruby. The interesting thing that I've noticed in that time is that Ruby is, for the most part, the same language (and ecosystem!!) it was 15+ years ago and that is a good thing. PHP has tried hard to not be the language and ecosystem that it was 15-20 years ago and because of that it feels pulled in a lot of different directions. You encounter code that mixes 15/20 year old functions with more enterprisey OO conventions that came out of the post PHP5 era. It can feel weird to switch to that from a language like Ruby that more or less has had coherent approach since 2003.

I'm sure it's nostalgia but I think the PHP 4 -> 5 transition was the best era of PHP. Codebases at that time mixed OO and C-ish function based programming in pragmatic and easy to understand ways. That weird shitshow of objects, functions that accept pass by reference or pass by value, request scoped global state, etc was fun and anarchic and, for whatever reason, totally made sense to a self-taught programmer like me at the time.