What's the deal with downing PHP development?

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses

Python is just a toy language. Ruby is just for small scripts and not big applications. Java is verbose and overengineers simple things...

I could go on and on for any X language that has had mainstream following for the last few decades. People love to hate what's popular. If PHP 8 adds a solve_world_hunger() function, people will still hate it because why not.

EDIT: For those not familiar, the quote is from the creator of C++: Bjarne Stroustrup. Ain't that neat? :D

PHP's a language people love to hate. It's messy, it's clunky, the standard library uses inconsistent nomenclature, it lends itself to a multitude of sins particularly in larger application architectures. It is often not taken seriously as a language, mostly for bad reasons, but the faults it does have do tend to make people who have used both PHP and other languages prefer those other languages to it (I among this number).

As with other things people love to hate its objective badness is often performatively overplayed. Eventually this becomes part of the legend, as it were, and people with no hands-on experience begin to immediately dismiss what worth it does have and what it's possible to accomplish with it. I hear PHP 7 fixed a lot of the real problems with previous versions, which is great, but I am also sure that this will do little short- and medium-term to stem the tide of PHP hate.

Modern web development is pick-your-poison. There's lots of interesting stuff happening with Node.js right now, to the point that the scene has become quite fragmented, but that process seems to be approaching stability as communities coalesce around a few major web and frontend frameworks. Ruby is also a substantial presence thanks to Rails' popularity, Elm is a thing, and there are of course still popular web frameworks in other languages like Python and Elixir. More server-centric web applications may still use a .Net or Java stack.

Because it is, for many reasons (most of them I blame on the community):

• it isn't the best at anything (out of the mainstream languages)
• didn't got the mainstream wave, so it was always the underdog
• if it wasn't for wordpress and a few projects probably it was as popular as Perl now days, as in dead
• the standard lib and the PHP as a project had bad decisions along the way and inconsistency
• it is slow
• a lot of messy code written in legacy projects
• there is no PHP way to write things, even in this post comments people are not agreeing how to name variables. This leads to many other problems.

There are many reasons to not make it your first language:

• because ..of the way things are now (low adoption), the number of jobs/projects is lower so is hard to find a good paying job
• if you want to be a web dev is simpler and faster (to be productive and get a job) to learn only 1 language (JS) and to write front and back end
• with Python or Java you have access to many more companies and projects and industries

With a 7 year experience on it (and I loved it for many years), after I have exit my bubble where PHP was everything I realized that it deserves to be a second class language and it doesn't worth to be added to a professional career skillset.

@tux0r Imo, don't prefix, don't use hungarian notation.

If we get typed properties in PHP 7.4 (or any later version) there's very little ground to cover that isn't typed.

Using type hints everywhere with declare(strict_types=1) fixes a lot of these issues.

@lucafabbri

• I like the two different method call notations. Clear separation of calls to static methods and instance methods.

• Not sure what you're driving here, but if someone can't do OO design then what can i say? If you're talking about global functions like in_array() then i agree. Yes they are bad. But frankly, do they really differ that much from static method calls like Array.map() or Math.max()?

check out this - eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fract...

some of it is not valid anymore, but gives you perspective, from where and from which mindset php is coming. And even though latest version might report another performance boost, and opcache became usable in cli commands (basically any non-web background processes) there is no php webserver - it relies on nginx, so no gRPC server, for example. As well as almost nothing from background processing or reactive/async patterns are available (kafka connectivity for example). PHP is still fine for Drupal/Wordpress, but if you are starting your own project, its very likely that sooner or later you would need something more than templating engine (which php at its core essentially is))), and here you will be dissapointed by what this platform can bring to the table.

As alternatives for web-based projects I would name Ruby + Rails or Python and Flask, if you want to start fast, and virtually any all-purpose stack, if you are fine with learning it first (its extremely simple to start with ror or python, but this should not make you think its easy to handle complicated design descisions)

PHP was my primary (bread-winning) language for a long time. I think a large part of it comes from the quality of a lot of the PHP code out there. Also the ease-of entry means there are a lot of people writing code that is not very good, and so it perpetuates the notion.

However, you CAN write good PHP code. There are a lot of good developers writing a lot of good PHP applications. Still, there are probably many more developers out there writing bad PHP, so this reputation will probably carry on for a long time yet.

If performance is not a big concern, then PHP is a half-decent language these days. The only reason to really dislike the language itself would be just the sheer amount of bad code out there that exists and is being written (for whatever reasons, popularity, ease-of-entry, or the platforms/CMSs written in it... who knows?).

Secondly, what are the better alternatives for web development?

• elixir-lang.org/
• golang.org/

Elixir is my default language for web stuff these days unless I have a really good reason to not choose it.

Go interests me and I have friends who love it. I think it would be great in some cases.

Haven't posted here for a while, but obviously topic close to my heart, so here goes.

Languages and frameworks are like religions - in the end they all do the same thing, yet the language one person uses is absolute single one everyone else should use, and every other option is bad, dying, dead, etc.

As with any language, if things get tough, you find a solution. Maybe different algorithm works better for given problem? Maybe you need to change server setup a little bit?

While these discussions still add to generic self doubt and impostor syndrome, I wouldn't pay too much attention on what other developers say, especially the ones that admit they don't use the current version of the language - they have their own reasons to prove that they do not need to use PHP, and that has nothing to do with you or your projects.

However, the problem rises when non-technical people start to request language or framework changes purely based on trends or articles on tech blogs that are close to click-bitey.

But as long as you keep your clients happy, no matter what tech you build your projects on, that's the only thing you need to worry about, IMHO.

Let me start with a blatant opinion: I'd rather use PHP than pre-await Node for writing a web application, because callback-oriented development is stupid. Node only became worth using when they added async-await, and even with that you end up having to write wrappers for outdated parts of the standard library just to write straightforward code. JavaScript just isn't that good of a programming language anyway.

Now with that out of the way, PHP has two big problems:

• It's inconsistent. Like, blatantly inconsistent, for no obvious reason. Some functions have prefixes like array_map($arr, $fn), some of them don't like sort($arr), some of them are not actually functions like empty($arr), and PHP has method call syntax, but doesn't use it for any of the array stuff. And parts of the standard library use CamelCase, while others use snake_case. The classes stdClass and DateTime are both in the standard library, too, just in case you were wondering what type of case class names should use.

  • Because of this, WordPress and Laravel both have equal claim to being "the PHP way" despite having such different coding styles. The better-respected Python, for example, has "there should ideally be one clearly correct way to do it" in its core manifesto.
  • Even other old crufty programming languages, like Java and C, are still able to at least follow consistent naming schemes (C always uses snake_case, Java has lowerSnakeCase variables and methods and UpperCamelCase classes).



• It has built-in affordances that are unusable in large, well-tested codebases. Superglobals, for example, make any functions that use them much harder to test, and php.ini is just one more piece of the environment that can affect whether a piece of code works right or not. And when PHP starts writing warning messages to the browser that get interleaved with the rest of your HTML, stuff can get really, really broken, so you have to turn that off, too, in production.

  • The last big PHP app I worked on had a bunch of wrappers to try to work around this, and shipped a "use this php.ini" in the source repo for the same reason.

PHP is the only language where I have seen development practices that are mind blowingly awful. I fully understand that you can write bad code in any language, but for some reason PHP devs manage to top any expectation of bad code one could have.

Let me give you 3 examples.

1. The switch statement (or equivalent) is available in many languages. It is fine to use. The paradigm is that you switch on a variable and each case is a constant. There are two languages I am aware of that do not enforce that constraint. javascript and PHP. There is only one language I have seen this constraint ignored. PHP. In multiple places in the code they used switch(true) and the case statements called functions. This was a well known company.

2. Using comments as code. I was trying to use a CMS developed in house (different company to the one above, not well known) and I was trying to figure out how to change which the main page was. I had to change part of a comment. I realise this isn't a default part of the language, so I guess the dev must have felt really proud of themselves.

3. Drupal 7 breaks PHP's raison d'etre. In my opinion PHP is a templating language for HTML. That's the best you can hope for it. Drupal 7 (maybe 8 is better, I don't know, I ran from PHP after this) is clunky, slow and confusing. But on top of that we had installed three themes, two were deactivated. Yet somehow a deactivated theme was able to interact with the active theme and break the templating it provided. Amazing. Why would Drupal allow deactivated themes to do that?

So, sure, you get bad programmers everywhere, but the frequency and severity which they occur in PHP means I am never going near it again. It is a bad language.

I guess what people do mean, when they arge about the language, if more about quality of stdlib, community, high-level concepts available in language - lambdas, pattern matching, type system, that allows you to expeess solution better (it is to some extent a matter of taste, and preferences of your team)