[user3939382]

> quirky projects of the Web 1.0 era still trusting php

Disagree with the dig at PHP. PhpStorm+Psalm doesn't give you perfection, but a perfectly respectable development environment. Using PHP isn't anachronistic, these shallow dismissals are. If anyone out there hasn't seen PHP 8 and Psalm yet, it's worth a look. All languages and ecosystems have trade offs, PHP is no exception, it is a good fit for many scenarios.

[nologic01]

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound dismissive (much less shallow!) about php. In fact I have great admiration for projects from wikipedia, to wordpress, moodle, matomo, you name it, before even talking about the modern php landscape you mention. In my book what you achieve is far more important than how you achieve it.

Crockford is arguing about "clean starts" and that is fine but the thrust of my comment that this will be driven by business models, not so much by tools. Sometimes tools are enablers of new things, so there is a chicken-and-egg aspect to it.

So we have all these ecosystems that were once flourishing but are now in a stationary state because the business models are in stationary state. There is a variety of tools that are good enough to get the current "job" done, but its not clear what will bring us to the next phase...

[DanielHB]

Modern Java with its modern IDEs used with good coding patterns is a completely fine environment as well

I think he meant more in the sense of projects that weren't adapted to modern coding standards

[gsk22]

While I applaud the recent-ish improvements to PHP, the biggest issue is still unresolved: the standard library is a mess. It is inconsistent as a rule -- in terms of function naming, argument order, error behaviors, etc.

I think this issue is probably intractable unless PHP wants to go the Python route and have a hard fork.

[tedivm]

I say this as someone who hasn't professionally used PHP in about a decade, but still has a few open source projects: the arguments against PHP are silly at best, especially this particular argument. With modern IDEs it's easy to work around these quirks in the language.

[ptx]

OK, but are there any good arguments for PHP? Why not use something less quirky instead?