- dev recruitment is hard.
- dev retention is hard.
- hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP
- it is PHP, with everything that it entails. It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language.
Number of available developers is still high but it could be even higher if it had the same successful propaganda as JavaScript or Python.
There is nothing in the language itself that should stop it from competing with any general purpose language, not anymore.
I think this is the next important step for PHP, have charismatic & humorous evangelist like Douglas Crockford.
Crockford’s missionary work was done during a time when JavaScript was in a big expansion because everyone wanted to write single page applications.
But today there is huge JavaScript fatigue and more and more developers have start to realize that server side rendering is (back to) the future for most of the traditional web, especially in a time where time to market has become even more important.
The constant churn of the JavaScript realm have now reached epidemic levels, a massive & relentless wave of deprecated and unsupported projects sweeps over every organization. Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp.
I think also there have been a shift in regards to fullstack developers versus frontend & backend developers, many companies have woken up to disastrous idea of splitting frontend & backend developers into separate teams and now merging them again, as result the fullstack developer becomes more important. PHP is in my opinion best fullstack web platform you can use.
Say after me, No more build steps for rendering a paragraph, no more unhandled Ajax errors, no more REST JSON apis with only the frontend as consumer, no more reimplementing the database schema in JavaScript, no more asynchronous state rendering on the same page. <Insert Braveheart meme>
> Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp.
That hit hard. I was reassigned to an old project from 5 years ago with an archaic framework, to refactor all the code to the "new shinny JS framework". Ironically, I was in the team that built it 5 years ago. It is dreadful. Rinse and repeat.
I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I advocate against projects that need 50,000 files and a 2-minute build when you could just do with HTML/CSS, native JavaScript and a simple CRUD backend.
Dynamically update parts of your page but still render everything on the backend, where you already have all your data.
Pass HTML fragments back, like we did in the old days prior to the JSON hype, but let htmx do the fetch & swap work so you don’t have to, that is only repetitive anyways.
Now you hardly need jQuery (or similar) anymore either, Just HTML & CSS.
If you use structured projects, (symfony) in our case its much easier to use and maintain.
We have older Java and Perl and Python to maintain. Its much harder to get those up and running.
The startup I worked at 8 years ago used PHP and got bought. I think the ability to get into it quickly and get something running is underrated frankly.
Some of those problems got addressed but by the time that happened PHP's reputation was irreversibly trashed and now nobody wants to know about it.
That is the world we live in. People do not want to learn PHP or work in PHP. Do a survey on any higher education institution and verify it yourself.
All the features you feel proud about... go take a look at the Java VM, .NET VM or a JS VM like V8... Those VMs are much more powerful than the PHP interpreter will ever be. Even CPython is faster.
Plus, as a Java developer you can make more than a PHP developer and there are more types of development you can do. Mobile, backend, desktop. PHP is mostly limited to backend and it is not even the best solution for that.
It's like building a car designed for just one thing, to go very fast on straight roads, then a general-purpose car comes along and somehow beats this car in this category.
How did it lose its grip? Did the PHP Group become too complacent being at the top?
Most general purpose languages do not have built in templating and do not have templating in their standard library.
As a programming language, many modern languages have a faster and more optimized runtime than PHP. If the Laravel authors ported their framework to Node, Python or Java it would certainly run faster.
As a templating language, it has to run on the server. That means you pay for the computing cost of templating not the end user. Unless you do your templating using a JS solution.
On top of that, you have to transfer a rendered page from your application server instead of just serving files from CDN at a fraction of the cost.
Overall, PHP is the wrong solution for the wrong problem. I used PHP in 2004 and then moved on. The industry at a large also moved on.
I haven't run the tests myself in 2021, but I used to do PHP for many years, and there were significant performance improvements done in PHP which I remember took it way ahead of Python at the time.
The benchmarks I’m familiar with[1] show recent PHP releases to be a lot faster than CPython for many tasks. Are there better benchmarks I should be aware of?
[1] https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
The majority of new programmers might not want to, but I consider it a clever strategy for new devs to get their foot in the door with their first real job. There's always a huge amount of open PHP jobs and if more elite devs are passing over those jobs then it means an opportunity for somebody. And some of those people who start with PHP will move on to more modern or better languages after they get their legs. It's a smart path to get on the dev career track, especially if you don't come from a traditional CS or dev background.
No way. It is pretty easy. To be fair it is harder in the Bay Area than let's say Europe, but it is still a non-issue. Also, the language is extremely easy to pick up, everyone is able to understand the code. This week for example I 've had an ios dev that is using Obj-C/Swift just dig into the code themselves to get clarity on an endpoint's execution.
> dev retention is hard.
Never really had an issue there.
> hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP
This also has not been a problem in the past few years. For context, I 've had multiple devs excited and pushing to start using new PHP8 features, already (and I had to be the boring one and ask to wait for hotfixes, a version .1 or .2 and see how stable and secure 8.x is first).
> It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language.
This is true. I 've met people who refuse to even look at PHP code, even though they are paid to do so (they might even refuse at the detriment of their peers). I 've never seen a "this is beneath me" attitude with any other tool or language before. (except perhaps the hate SQL databases got in 2015-2016) So yeah, the hate runs deep.
I have been contacted for every single of my other skills, even F# which is one of the most rarely used languages ever.
Many PHP projects are successful. WordPress, Nextcloud, Wikipedia, Facebook...
Something about it must be right.
What does PHP entail??
And those languages are pretty popular compared to others.
The programming language you use is a important factor when it comes to scaling your team (and your product, and your business).
I do not want to start a bikeshedding holy war. The reference implementation of PHP is pretty inferior to that of other scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, Julia and Node. There are other implementations that are better but come at a compatibility cost.