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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

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blowski·

* Lots of cheap developers available

* Strong community

* Mature frameworks and libraries

* Simple hosting model

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Fair, though I'd say 1-3 are more or less matched by Java/.NET and probably NodeJS.

Not sure if you meant this, but now that I think about it, the "one process per request" model is actually legit differentiator that obviates a lot of the concurrency trouble new developers can get themselves into with other languages. It makes good performance harder in some cases (though there are workarounds), but overall it's maybe the one thing in PHP that I'd like to see other languages make some note of.

I'd agree that there are other languages with equally strong communities and mature libraries. I would say it's easier to hire an OK PHP developer for £40K than for any other language, at least that's my experience hiring in London.

The hosting model - what you said, plus not needing to think about memory leaks. There are so many Java and .NET boxes out there that need to be rebooted every 2 hours because of some insidious bug that nobody on the team can solve. It's also pretty easy to put PHP in a container, and scale horizontally.

Good point about the memory leaks. Not aiming to contradict it, but I'll mention that https://www.eclipse.org/mat/ is a great help in debugging Java memory leaks. .NET probably has something similar.

I can say with confidence if you're hiring a developer for £40K they're not okay. I know PHP communities can be insular and can fail to sell themselves, and I know that local economies can vary wildly, but London is not cheap and 51kUSD is less than half what an "okay" dev should be paid. If you're hiring at those rates you are hiring people who are either unhireable bad at their job or (like I was for the first half of my career) completely unaware of what's available.

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