Tl;dr: it is not.
It was an important moment for me. I was turning 30. One of my best friends organized a lovely house party, and another DJ frien...
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I started web development around 2012 and back then node, django, rubyonrails and more were rising but I could never wrap my head around why you would ever use them over PHP.
Starting with the environment theres nothing more supported than PHP, you can go to any provider and it will have Apache/PHP stacks available. Also the cost is very low. You can get a domain with server for 5-30€ a year. With python etc. you first have to set up your VM with a cloud provider, connect your domain with it and install some other software to make it run.
Also I really love the whole community and environment.
People always argue with StackOverflow questions but thats the most bullshit Ive ever seen because it only show that more people have problems with a language.
If you are active in PHP tags most of it is duplicates, laravel stuff of people who dont really know what theyre doing or very specific problems because everything has already been answered.
There are a ton of library and everything you need to get a full scalable web app up and running fast with low cost.
Also the documentation.
To this day I havnt seen a better language reference.
Nope, PHP is not dead, and I suspect will be around for a long time. PHP has grown a lot quite recently and its ecosystem and community are very good. Just follow the best practices you would follow in any other language (SRP, Clear variable name, Tests e.t.c.), and you can build robust Softwares with PHP, not just websites. Take for instance
Doctrine, its actually one of the better ORM's that I have used.I made this thread...
One thing led to another and I built my own static site generator today
Ben Halpern ・ May 3 ・ 2 min read
And someone wrote this...
I agree about keeping dependencies low in small projects! When I hop between multiple projects, I can feel the context switching cost if there are setups involved.
By the way, this looks like a great use-case for…
And it kind of blew my mind because I'd kind of forgotten all about php in a way. It doesn't scross my mind how damn useful it can be if used for the right purpose.
I am more than happy to hear this from you! Maybe a bit out of context, but this reminded me a conversation between Adam Wathan and Pieter Levels here
It was joy when I read your post about building an SSG then I was like: What would people say about @ben building an SSG when there are "solutions" out there?.
I scrolled down to read the comments and the first comment I read was the one included in your comment, and I was like this is simple and interesting as it gets.
I did not bother to read the remaining comments. With
BackspaceorCtrl + W, I was off.No PHP is not dead yet and won't be for at least 20 years from now on I believe.
PHP is one of the most mature programming languages despite its flaws in architecture which gets fixed eventually in every update. Some people say that PHP is outdated which I don't believe since there are plenty of great frameworks that they get updates pretty often and are very well-structured such as Laravel or Symfony. PHP is yet one of the fastest programming languages both in terms of development and response time amongst most of the programming languages used nowadays.
TL;DR: No it is not dead.
In PHP we have real "best practices" like PSR. In the newest JavaScript frameworks we don't even know if the ";" is mandatory or not. The documentation often differs with the examples. And I don't found the learning curve as good as everyone said it to me.
With PHP you can do almost anything, the performances are really good (I'm waiting for PHP 8) and it won't be acclaimed just because it's "new".
Insecurity and imposter syndrome that many software developers go through, is what make them talk bad about a language, in my own experience I don’t think a language is the problem, it can never be! It’s like trying to put someone down so that you can feel better. I love all the programming languages out there.
This. Like an infinite loop, saying that a language is crap on some forum then another developer reading that just makes imposter syndrome that much worse.
Every language has its flaws. Use the one you’re assigned or pick one with which you can live with the flaws.
I don’t think it’s really healthy to talk crap about something that someone has spent time building, deep down it’s just a was of time
You are right my friend it should be like that and simple, if you are not happy with a Language just move on to the next until you find the one you are happy and solve your problems.
I mean there are exceptions in the node world like adonis.js but most node projects just don't compare with the simplicity and productivity of a good ole Laravel app.
Node being shit for back-end dev doesn't make PHP good, though
Just out of interest, have you used Laravel specifically? It has clean abstractions over all the raw hated stuff. Sure it can't get rid of all its flaws but it does a pretty good job at keeping it at a minimum.
I'm not saying that Laravel is bad per se but given the burden of PHP legacy and all the things that Laravel will never be able to do while you get all of that for free with Django or any other decent web framework, I think that starting a PHP project today is not a rational choice.
have you seen what's coming with php 8 or the improvements of php7.X?
Well, PHP 7.X I looked and used when forced to do PHP, but I didn't had quite a chance look at PHP 8 so far.
My feelings so far would be like:
str_contains,str_starts_withetc? Also don't get me started on naming conventions.get_debug_type()because apparentlygettype()wasn't good enough, although let's keep it for confusion. Also, what the fuck? The type is the type right?Overall, when I read the release notes of a nice language I'm like "oh that's neat" and when I do this with PHP I'm like "that's neat... ish... wait wat".
I don't understand why you would lose your time with a language that still by default is just a gigantic print of the file's content, where you can fuck up an entire API with just a single misplaced space or where you still have to code your own module system every single time. Yes it's getting better but what is the point of polishing a turd while you can have diamonds for free?
Preach!
I think we need to stop having this discussion altogether.
I think there's a collective trauma among PHP developers that dates back to 15 years ago when PHP was a lot more quirky (PHP 4 or early PHP 5 days) and got a lot of heat from some developers. Nowadays there is no reason to even consider if it might be dying.
Sure Go, Rust and Kotlin are great new languages, but it doesn't mean that Python, Ruby or PHP have suddenly become obsolete, and I don't see nearly as many posts asking if Python is dead or if Ruby is dead.
Because Python and Ruby aren't pieces of shit, that's why. The only thing that changed in PHP is that the developers became less bad and the tools improved but the language stayed the same.
Dude, I still see most SQL/XSS injection prone websites without password hashing been written in PHP. Just because there are some good sites in PHP doesn't mean most beginners create awfully insecure websites, which you won't find in any other language at all, because beginners in other languages use proper frameworks like Flask, Django, SQLAlchemy. Even go which is kind of frameworkless doesn't suffer from the same level of data leaking websites beginners create in PHP
I know you can't hold PHP accountable for WordPress but I've definitely spent too many hours worrying about WordPress security and fighting off hackers to not feel a little resent.
Similar thing goes for Java. They wish it was dead but hey. Also for OOP they would love to kill it off and make everything FP. Althoug I personally dislike the syntax of PHP I don't think it's bad enough to avoid it. I like list.map instead of function_nm_smtg(whyyy) but that's a personal preference
I used to work with Java in 2014 but I've heard it changed a lot since. I left on Java 8 and now on Java 1X, have things changed a lot?
Changing is a better term. I used v11 because of var keyword. However 14 has preview of records which are similar to kotlin data classes and switch expressions which means you get to do
Something like that. But I'm mainly waiting to see what happens with project loom. However collecting stuff via map or such might still be messy.
Basically some efforts are being made through versions but not as much as devs would want. Example switch expression and pattern matching are still treated as experimetal
Yes, but?
PHP was originally created to be a template engine and that is what it fundementally still is. Yes many template engines and frameworks have been built on top of PHP since, each offering some higher level abstraction or Model View Controller like shabang. Its simplicity is not the (only) reason it is still so widely used.
78% of websites uses PHP currently and 9 out of 10 websites uses Wordpress? I am very curious where you get your stats.
That is a very true statement but you don't want to just please the content manager. You also want to take into consideration how compatible your methods are with other developers in the possible future.
The question whether PHP is supposedly dead or not is ultimately meaningless, depending on what level of analysis you want to answer the question. It's something mostly inexperienced developers like to have an opinion and argue about. I encounter people that get into the exact same discussion about jQuery. Nobody uses jQuery anymore. we have Web Components now!
Thanks for your comment!
At early times, PHP's simplicity to create websites made itself the most used server-side programming language. Of course, there were some architectural implementations after PHP became popular. Therefore PHP itself still keeps its leading position even backends are not simple templating engines anymore.
We are on the same page with you about continuous support of development. Of course, the only concern should not be all about making users or editors happy and shipping things fast. You also should not be the person who writes that spaghetti codes around, as I described in the article. But this is all about the development skills of you. It's not much to do with PHP itself.
I think you misunderstand what I said though, which is that PHP was designed to be a template engine from day 1.
I have spent couple of years developing apps in PHP and it's not dead per se. Things have been improved lately, especially with the release of Laravel & PHP 7. Also, WordPress, written in PHP, dominates the CMS market and its popularity is only increasing.
Thanks for the article, it's really useful for people who develop in or want to learn PHP 🙏🏽
PHP was my first web language and I built my first web application in it in school.
I don't use it anymore really and honestly haven't used it in a few years. One of our clients has an application that is built on like PHP 5.1.x. It's very old. What makes it worse is that the application is built on top of some really old CMS platform that is no longer a thing and has zero documentation on the internet anymore it seems, or that we can find. We have tried to upgrade the version of PHP it uses but immediately ran into issues where everything would just break. So we still haven't gone down that rabbit hole yet. The code base is also a very delicate thing. You have to be careful changing anything cause it could break so much. Though the application is just so large that paying for a rewrite isn't doable right now.
I myself have no problem with a more modern PHP codebase. Language is simple. It does its job and does it well. It's just not my cup of tea really. I myself just don't like to get old PHP projects from clients because most of the time it just seems they are beyond saving. But that very well could be me since I don't use PHP everyday anymore, and don't know the upgrade process for a really large, poorly documented, PHP project.
I see a lot of projects around like this one. Tons of security vulnerabilities, so much bad code because of this "fast shipping" mentality. What I think is; it is because of the developer not because of the language.
There is no doubt it is the developer and not the language. You can write bad code in any language.
I didn't mean for it to sound like I'm blaming PHP. There is no doubt it is just how it was built and not the language. You can write bad code in any language and any framework.
I do think that maybe older languages see it more since you will have to deal with older code bases a lot more.
I do get that as well I started off as a PHP dev and now I'm a .net core developer. Still some of the best concepts I learned I learned from my previous team working with PHP. I still haven't met a framework which is as fun to work with, as elegant, and as well documented as Laravel (php). Lots of languages talk about having reflection and how powerful that is when it is already an inherent part of PHP. The dependency injection frameworks part of Symfony and Laravel are also awesome, in addition to things like validation and restful controllers are all made easy to work with.
Anyone who assumes PHP is dead, or even decaying, is simply wrong. I mean it is literally being actively developed, with PHP 8 coming in December of this year.
I'll admit PHP isn't my go-to, but since version 7, I don't mind using it at all!
No, I had earlier worked on PHP and Wordpress projects. There is still so many individuals prefer PHP built sites. But looking at career opportunities and language preferences many developers neglect PHP.
So glad this wasn't yet another post literally asking if PHP is dead. Like you, I actually enjoy using PHP.
PHP language development is also moving much faster than it was a few years or so ago.
As long as my bills are covered because of PHP, I can't say it is dead.
haha good one!
PHP is not dead but it is in slow decline. That is perfectly normal, new better languages come but until now no programming language has been killed by another language.
Related...
Retraction of an Obituary
Jason C. McDonald ・ Dec 28 '18 ・ 8 min read
This is a nice one!
Is COBOL dead?
Thank me later.
Golang, Javascript, Rust developers have been killing PHP for since Stackoverflow days. Yet to see PHP dying to be honest.
You remind me of this post:
The Noise. It's everywhere.
drew ・ Jan 11 ・ 3 min read
indeed!
Just triggered by the title. And no, PHP isn't doing to die. It have its niche, big enough. Probably it will outstand some lesser technologies
I would say no, thanks to frameworks like Laravel and CMSs like WordPress.
PHP is an ugly language with a bad-design, but it's not dead. I usually use it for my projects because it is cheap and easy.
As long as there will be a requirement for a backend there will be a need for PHP! I have been writing in PHP since PHP 3 way back in 1999 and have always got plenty of work! 21 years and going!
No.