[gregjor]

You would have to compare PHP to the alternatives available at the time. Originally PHP replaced Perl and ASP, which have their own problems and no static types (back then). Ruby/Rails came out and got traction but was slow, buggy, and still no types. Python also slow, no types, and not great for web development.

Then we got Javascript and Node, with even less sensible types (no integers!) so you have to use Typescript and lots of tooling to get what PHP offers.

In enterprise environments Java and then C#/.Net dominated and did have strong typing, but that’s not the world of PHP.

Comparing PHP from a decade or longer in the past to Go et al. hardly seems apples to apples.

So if you want to dismiss PHP as “shitty” compared to “most others” define shitty and identify the others.

[Morelesshell]

PHP without types / types in comments existed in parallel to spring boot for years.

And im pretty sure that the history of PHP is still everywere inside PHP, like php function inconsistencies across the board.

Or whats the current situation on unicode support?

When i started with PHP4 and Lamp, what a great time. JavaEE was bloated, not a lot of good free webservers available, granted.

But while PHP5 was great and had a loooong shelflife, JEE became much cooler and had fundamental critical things like CDI and really good CDI Frameworks.

Eclipse Java IDE was always really good, something PHP hadn't had for ages.

And if you look at the fundamental difference between lets say java and php: In Java you have specs and reference implementations (partially also thanks to oracle, you now have mulitply companies having their JVMs) which made the JVM very robust and fast.

When Facebook did the hhvm/hack stuff, that was great and pushed enough nerves to rethink the performance of PHP but the performance gains were stupid crazy. Thats a very good indication when a language with so little money and support has such a huge performance gain after such a long time existing.

The fact that Facebook than threw the PHP community under the bus with hhvm/hack didn't make it better.

[gregjor]

I don't think PHP and Java really compete for mindshare. Java has mainly thrived for larger enterprise projects, whereas PHP appealed to individual developers and smaller businesses, and applications like WordPress. Of course there's overlap and companies may use both, but writing a web application in Java requires significantly more investment than choosing PHP.

Eclipse supported PHP from 2007, and the PHPStorm IDE from JetBrains dates to 2010 or 2011. Java has always had better tooling because of the enterprise focus. PHP IDEs are very good today.

PHP 7.x and 8.x have seen big performance improvements. I haven't seen hack/hhvm get much traction outside of Facebook but maybe it did.

[danaris]

I don't wish to put words in your mouth, but it certainly sounds like your argument is essentially, "PHP was bad, therefore PHP is and will always be bad, no matter what improvements it makes."

This...doesn't seem particularly reasonable?

You're not required to like PHP, and you don't need a reason why things you dislike are objectively bad in order to be allowed to dislike them.

[Morelesshell]

Its just a discussion and my personal opinion i'm sharing.

Its hn, i think its reasonable to discuss asthetics of langauges?

But yes the history of PHP is murky and i do believe, that a few small changes could have big advantages for PHP and because PHP was one of my first languages and i also developed for it for a few years, i do have some type of connection to it.

Just imagine having a more community / sig driven approach defining a spec first, than having a reference implementation and opening it up to others.

And a PHP base rework would also help. Rethinking the architecture and code, cleaning it up and fixing issues which are still there because of it like unicode support.