I'm a professional PHP, Python and Javascript developer from the UK. I've worked with Django, Laravel, and React, among others. I also maintain a legacy Zend 1 application.
Modern PHP isn't a bad language. It's just been given a bad name by the lowest tier of WordPress plugin installers who call themselves developers. If you don't touch WordPress with a bargepole and work exclusively with a modern MVC framework you can have a pretty decent experience with it.
The modern PHP ecosystem is pretty nice. Composer is about as good a dependency handler as I have seen elsewhere, and these days most packages you may find are decent quality, typically with proper tests, and static analysis is becoming increasingly widespread.
The tooling is pretty decent too. I use Intelephense in Neovim and that gives me a good experience. I find Psalm incredibly useful too.
There's also plenty of decent content management systems available. I really like Statamic - it's a much better developer experience than using WordPress, and although it comes with a price tag, I found it covers everything I typically need out of the box, whereas WordPress needs several paid plugins for most use cases.
I’ve had a joy working with php for the last 4 years (it was also my starting language about 10 years ago, before I switched to C#, Objective C, and Java). Overall, modern PHP is a lovely language to work with. Though, I probably wouldn’t use it as much if it wasn’t for Laravel. But I could say the same for C# and .NET, or Swift and UIKit. What matters is, how can I achieve the app I want to build, while all the boilerplate like Auth, AuthZ, ORMs, etc. are all handled already.
I recommend anyone to try PHP and Laravel. It’s hard to go back.
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Modern PHP isn't a bad language. It's just been given a bad name by the lowest tier of WordPress plugin installers who call themselves developers. If you don't touch WordPress with a bargepole and work exclusively with a modern MVC framework you can have a pretty decent experience with it.
The modern PHP ecosystem is pretty nice. Composer is about as good a dependency handler as I have seen elsewhere, and these days most packages you may find are decent quality, typically with proper tests, and static analysis is becoming increasingly widespread.
The tooling is pretty decent too. I use Intelephense in Neovim and that gives me a good experience. I find Psalm incredibly useful too.
There's also plenty of decent content management systems available. I really like Statamic - it's a much better developer experience than using WordPress, and although it comes with a price tag, I found it covers everything I typically need out of the box, whereas WordPress needs several paid plugins for most use cases.
I’ve had a joy working with php for the last 4 years (it was also my starting language about 10 years ago, before I switched to C#, Objective C, and Java). Overall, modern PHP is a lovely language to work with. Though, I probably wouldn’t use it as much if it wasn’t for Laravel. But I could say the same for C# and .NET, or Swift and UIKit. What matters is, how can I achieve the app I want to build, while all the boilerplate like Auth, AuthZ, ORMs, etc. are all handled already.
I recommend anyone to try PHP and Laravel. It’s hard to go back.