Will PHP save your startup?

About two months ago Alexander Katrompas wrote a post on medium titled Java will kill your startup. PHP will save it.. I already posted a short response as a comment there, but I thought it might be worthwhile to elaborate on that a little.

Again, if there's anything of which I can call myself an expert, that would probably be PHP. I don't really like PHP anymore, I don't write a lot of PHP anymore, but I do know it very well.

The arguments

Just to quickly recap, here are Alexander's arguments in a nutshell:

• Many large-scale projects started off being written in PHP and over 80% of the top 10M web sites use PHP.
• PHP programmers are more plentiful and cheaper than Java programmers. (web-only)
• PHP has excellent performance and it continuously gets better and in-practice easily rivals compiled languages.
• PHP application time to market is a fraction of Java EE applications.
• PHP is not a “scripting” language (whatever that means), it’s a fully function, object oriented, web powerhouse.
• PHP 7.x is a vast improvement over previous versions and 8.0 promises to surpass all expectations.
• Frameworks are plentiful and powerful. The power, popularity, and dominance of Symfony and Laravel is undeniable.
• WordPress (PHP driven) is the dominant CMS with almost 60% market share. The next top 5 CMSs, are all PHP driven.
• PHP is simply made for the web. No extra servers, processors, hacks, tricks needed. It is literally one with your web server.
• Most dominant open source e-commerce systems are all written in PHP. (WooCommerce, Magento, OpenCart, PrestaShop, ZenCart, Drupal, Joomla, OsCommerce, and on, and on, and on…

My comments on the arguments

As the title and the above list shows, Alexander was comparing PHP to Java EE. Now I have very little knowledge on the latter, but I can tell you that for most startups PHP is no longer the best choice.

Just to clarify, there are a few points that I strongly disagree with. In my opinion:

1. PHP is a scripting language. It does have decent OO features, but that has nothing to do with it being a scripting language. What it does affect is first that not all of your code will be loaded into memory when a request is served (good), that all of your errors will be runtime errors (bad) and of course that your code will be interpreted on an as-needed basis instead of having it all compiled to byte code or some intermediate language. Sidenote: Alexander mentions "function, .. oriented" there as well, but I'm hoping that was nothing more then some copy-paste mistake.
2. PHP 7 is a step in the right direction, but it wasn't brave enough to really clean up the API and I doubt PHP 8 will be.
3. PHP is made for the web but there are extra servers, processors, hacks and tricks needed. It is absolutely not one with your web server and if you've been close enough to operational teams of big PHP projects you'll know how much a pain in the ass it can be. Not that it's a PHP-specific thing but just to get things straight. I'm guessing that Alexander was referring to the PHP apache extension, but that's not something I've seen running live in the last 10 years and probably you shouldn't either...
4. PHP is fast enough for serving as the backend of an API. If you need true performance for complicated stuff (databases, crypto-mining, etc.) then it probably isn't.

Still, with all these corrections I think the problem lies in what's missing from the list, not what's in there.

First of all if your startup is about selling flip-flops, then by all means go ahead, install Magento and off you go. You'll still be able to ditch it for something more flexible when you actually start to make money and feel the pain of running an over-engineered, yet rigid system. (wink-wink Zalando).

If however you want to build something that's a true Zero-to-One type startup, you need a system that gives you agility:

1. Fast to learn.
2. Fast to prototype in.
3. Straight-forward to harden.
4. Enables fast and safe refactoring.

Plus I'd consider these things as nice-to-haves for startups but absolutely must-haves for mature companies:

1. Maintainable
2. Secure

And finally two nice-to-haves for the most successful startups, the corporations:

1. Exciting
2. Trustworthy

Fast to prototype in

Now I have the feeling that Alexander focused way too much on prototyping for which PHP is quite good indeed. Not the best, but certainly decent, probably better than the famously verbose Java is.

Just to clarify, Java is famous for being verbose but I wouldn't call PHP concise either. It's not a really a criticism, simply a statement. (In comparison Python and Ruby code tend to be significantly shorter and easier to read than equivalent PHP code.)

Straight-forward to harden

When it comes to hardening, your only real choice is adding more tests because the type system is just very hard to rely on. You can harden your own code ensuring that you use types everywhere (you'll need at least 7.1 to really do that) and marking each of your files to be type checked strictly, but it's a hassle, error prone and it's tough to get all your dependencies to provide similar safety. Also, if you end up using any of the popular frameworks (Symfony, Laravel, Zend, etc) you're out of luck, as they all -support 5.x still- (Correction: they require PHP 7 lately, but don't enforce strict type checking). And the truth is that 99.9% of all PHP teams will decide to use these tools because of familiarity and the size of their ecosystems.

If the choices only came down to PHP and Java, I'm sure Java would easily win here. It still suffers from the billion dollar mistake, but at least the compiler will yell at you if you change your API in one file and forgot to update it in another. In PHP you'll just hope it will be caught in a test or during code review, given you have those. (Spoiler alert! In most start-ups you don't, because you know, they take time and therefore money)

Enables fast and safe refactoring

When it comes to fast and safe refactoring there's hardly anything worse than PHP, so Java would win easily, mainly still due to its type safety and the compiler being able to check your whole application by default. Again Java is probably far from the best choice as some functional and functional-inspired languages will go further in this regard, but I think it should already be decent.

Fast to learn

This is the final point in the must-have section for startups, but it can be very important in some cases. Alexander avoids this problem by saying it's cheaper to hire PHP devs and Java devs. While it's probably true, the difference likely not to be comparable to choosing the wrong language and having to rewrite everything later. Yes, as a startup you might want to cut that 20% on IT salary expenses, but you should understand that you're playing with fire. I myself would rather risk running out of money 2-10% earlier then risking years of suffering of wrong choices early on.

So if we agree with the premise that you can always bring in people already familiar with your stack then Alexander was probably right, but the difference shouldn't make or brake your startup.

I'd however argue that I'd prefer working with a language that less people know but is very easy to learn. That way you can get the best domain experts bring tremendous value and you never risk of running out of local talents because any engineer you'd get would be able to get productive in a few weeks.

Now this is where I'm fairly sure both PHP and Java suck, and they actually suck big time. Both these languages try to satisfy everyone, putting all sorts of features into the language and both of these have huge-huge ecosystems which take years and perhaps decades to fully oversee and takes tons and tons of reading to make sure you understand best practices and things to avoid. Not to mention how much terrible advice must be out there for both of these languages... Still, as a beginner searching for good answers must be a nightmare both for Java and PHP.

In contrast many newer languages try to keep things straight forward. Go is the most obvious example here but Elm and Rust can also simplify many things even if they bring in some concepts which are harder to grasp at first.

Ecosystems of these new languages are also cleaner and in the case of Go most things you'll use are in the standard library, tested at Google-scale and quality that you can easily bet your company on. The community also lives and breaths the Unix-philosophy, which means popular tools tend to do one thing and do that well. It's definitely not true for PHP and I doubt it would be for Java EE, although I can't really judge that.

Note: I hinted it before, but to be clear: if you can utilise one of the many open source PHP applications out there then it can be a much larger save than just 2-10% and it might make a lot of sense. Most obvious example is e-commerce, but there are some others as well. In case of e-commerce, you should either just use an existing ready-made service, some marketplace or build on top of Magento, Thelia or Sylius. Prestashop might have some use cases too, but if anyone recommended me WooCommerce, OpenCart, ZenCart, Drupal, Joomla or OsCommerce for e-commerce, I'd run away and I'd run far.

Maintainable

I spent most of my professional carrier working on huge (>1.000.000 lines) legacy applications trying to clean up the mess my predecessors left behind themselves. Most of the pain came from over-engineered OOP monstrosities. Because of that, I truly appreciate the simplicity of Go and Rust and for me both PHP and Java would score really badly.

I also enjoy the extra safety functional languages can provide but they can affect how fast a language is to learn, so you'd have to take that into account while assessing them for "fast to learn" and "excitement".

Secure

This is a point where I really lack the knowledge to properly assess Java, but PHP does have a pretty bad track record. I have the feeling that Java would fair better, but I'd rather skip this topic saying that there are better languages out there than PHP. In fact, I believe PHP is among the worst.

Exciting

Now this is certainly not important for all startups but if you are thinking about something technologically challenging, then you should try to appeal to the best minds available in your area. These people will be able to learn a new language, but they won't learn just any language you throw at them. Not because they can't, but because they don't want to.

Unfortunately PHP is among the least respected languages out there and this means that the brightest software engineers probably never learned PHP and probably aren't willing to learn it.

Java is slightly better off here because anyone who got a computer science degree in the last 2 decades have learnt Java at some point and many even stuck with or sticked to it. On the other hand it's also not the most popular language to learn for people outside of the Java community these days.

On the upside however there are other JVM languages with current momentum (Scala and Kotlin mostly) which claim to provide easy access to anything written in Java, so that could be a safe way forward I think.

I will admit that this is not a topic I can't fully assess, but I have the feeling Java still wins here.

Trustworthy

This is an easy knockout for Java EE. If you want to go public or sell your product to fortune 500s you'll want Microsoft (C#), SAP and Java EE on your portfolio. And that's pretty much a complete list as far as I know.

Conclusions

So I had PHP winning one point easily and another one potentially. There are many points where I admitted I don't necessarily have the Java-knowledge to assess both but in these cases PHP scored pretty bad, forcing me to believe that Java is the better technology to start a green-field project.

This does not mean that PHP will kill your startup and Java will save it. What this post meant to say is that you should understand the consequences of your choices, understand the risks you make and choose whatever will make you sleep better.

• If cutting 2-10% of IT expense is all you want then PHP (or NodeJs) is reasonable.
• If you need to have your blog or e-commerce site available ASAP then PHP is probably your best choice, but you should make a good reason not to use an existing service instead.
• If you want to sell your product to Fortune 500 companies then Java is probably still the keyword to score a deal, although other JVM or .NET languages might also make sense.
• If ensuring you won't find yourself in a situation where you have to rewrite everything then use a statically typed, compiled language. I'd recommend Go but I hear Kotlin might be a reasonable choice as well.
• If you don't need first class support by major cloud providers, but runtime errors can kill your company then consider Rust or Haskell.

Finally, if you really wanted a simple answer to the question "will PHP save your startup?", I'd have to say no. Not unless you're building something on top of an existing PHP application. Will PHP kill your startup though? Probably not, but it's likely to make it less agile than it could be.