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Discussion on: PHP vs Node?

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Boris Jamot ✊ /

PHP is not for beginners, it's true. All people I know that agree with you don't know PHP.

It requires a strong tooling to be effective and be confident with your code. But it's still a valuable choice for backend apps.

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Rémy 🤖

PHP was actually helpful when I was a beginner in 2003 but actually better options came out and kind of exposed the fact that PHP will encourage dangerous behaviors. In fact, I can specifically thank phpBB for teaching me all the common security mistakes you can imagine.

Last week I spent hours fixing potential remote code execution issues in a very popular piece of PHP and that makes me very sad. Because this kind of problem is VERY easy to have.

Of course you can artificially throw away 3/4 of the language and base everything upon more or less decent community-built tools while praying that none of your juniors will create a colossal hole in your code but knowing the alternatives that's really not the choice I'd make.

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Boris Jamot ✊ / • Edited

As I said, it's definitely not for juniors. As an experienced PHP developer, I'm responsible for delivering safe apps with secured Apache configuration, built with clean code and tested in a pipeline. It's more difficult in PHP than in any other language, but I learnt so much more than if I had chosen the last all-in-one ready-to-go JS framework.
But if I had to choose a programming language to start my career today, it wouldn't be PHP.