| > People seem to love to hate it because it's the "cool" thing to do. While I agree with this, I think the tone is slightly dismissive. From what I have seen, older people in our trade seem to recommend against PHP due to it having a terrible relationship with consistency, functionality, performance, etc. in its history. Though I have (thankfully) seen that the language and its standard library has undergone several large improvements, which is great to hear. > Yet PHP developers continue to ship things faster, while JS devs are probably still fiddling with their Node environment setup... On your point of JavaScript, the build environment nonsense can definitely get hairy. It's why we get things like Deno, which attempt to throw all this cruft away and start again. And sometimes that's a good idea. If you're dedicated to Node, replacing Webpack with Rollup seems to be what is generally recommended. The only obvious disadvantage there is compatibility with Webpack plugins. It would be nice to have a type-checked JavaScript variant with a practically non-existent build environment (no Webpack, Rollup, etc.) As much as I adore TypeScript, the compiler itself is massive and takes quite a long time to even start. |
As an older person in the trade, I don't agree with the other older persons. Only consistency is a problem with PHP code, and that is largely NOT caused by PHP. Inconsistency is the product of developers coding without any real thought about how to abstract things (ok, well, maybe not in the case of magic strings). You can do this with every language. Some languages do everything possible to force consistency, and developer still find a way to be delightfully inconsistent even with the syntactic equivilent of bowling gutter bumpers (see Cobol, Go, Java). Consistency is a developer problem. You can write great code in languages that are terrible.
PHP has never been slow (compared to other dynamic languages), or lacked functionality. If there is a rub on PHP it comes from no separation of code and presentation, which flew in the face of the MVC pattern which was THE WAY for a very long time. Now... well, JSX much? Anyhow, my team works with Go, JS, PHP and Python, and the code that takes the least effort to both extend and maintain is... the PHP.