[GeneralTspoon]

Except PHP isn’t dead - in fact it’s probably going through a renaissance.

The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.

[nevi-me]

I presume it's (Lavarel) a good default choice for someone active in PHP. Like many people, PHP was my first programming language, and I migrated away from it long ago. What's relevant for me is:

* How many new developers are picking up PHP

* How many remain using it after say 10 years

* How many end up contributing to its tooling and ecosystem

If those numbers are good in absolute terms, then I agree with you.

I'd consider Perl to be a dying language, not PHP. I'd also expect an active language's tooling to improve over the years, so that probably doesn't stand out too much for me (there's brilliant people working in various languages, in PHP I consdier Nikita Popov as one of them).

[o1y32]

The fact that there are new and exciting things happening has nothing to do with whether the language is becoming less popular/relevant/adopted. Almost any index or ranking for programming languages you can find, TIOBE, stackoverflow survey and even Google Trends show that interest in php has been declining and not coming back. That is just the reality, and nobody is going to care if some part of the language or ecosystem improves.

[edmundsauto]

Is that because its relative share is declining or because the absolute number is declining? The former indicates they are capturing as much of the new growth in devs, the latter there is an approaching problem.

[o1y32]

Read my comment again.