|
I write PHP for my job almost every day, and have for the past 4 years, and there's some truth to what you say: anything you can write in another language, you can also write in PHP. Personally, I can't stand writing PHP, because, sure, I can write secure, testable, safe code in any language, including PHP, but, how do I say this, PHP is the only language that feels actively hostile to my attempts to do so. The house style at my current company could be boiled down to "Check 3 times that there are no PHP footguns present in this code. We have been burned before." The developer experience and tooling is far behind comparable languages. I feel like I have to put my sysadmin hat on to fix anything that goes wrong with my environment. When I write Javascript or Python, I have complaints and issues, but I enjoy writing code. I think PHP, for many programmers, including myself, is just a hostile and unenjoyable experience. If you enjoy writing PHP, I have nothing against you and am certain you will remain employable, there's a lot of PHP out there. > Honest question: what are people using if not PHP? Node? Python? The 80% of us who aren’t FAANG and are writing CRUD apps. Python, Node, Java, .NET, Ruby. MVC CRUD apps are pretty similar in all of these (also in PHP). All of those languages (including PHP) power many many many software companies (including FAANG, who use a lot of Java and C++, and Facebook famously was built on PHP). |
Surely JS has at least an equal amount of foot-guns to PHP. I mean, at least PHP (to my knowledge) never had a meta-language written around it that compiles to PHP to make it safer.