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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

> Everything you say is also true for Java or Kotlin

Uhh no. Getting a local dev environment set up for PHP is much much easier.

Writing your first line of code and seeing things run in a browser is much much easier.

Uploading a single standalone PHP file you wrote to your 5$ webhost via SFTP, with _no other work required_ and just seeing your code run on your website? Show me how to do that exact thing in almost any other web programming language. You can't.

No one said PHP was perfect, and I'm not here to defend all the problems, but to compare PHP's almost universal accessibility and ease of use (which is why it is so popular) to something like Java or C# is ridiculous.

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If anyone thinks local dev with Java/Kotlin is hard they haven't tried it in the last decade. The years of WARs and application servers are long since gone, every framework you would interact with (Spring etc) are self-hosting, i.e even easier than PHP because you don't need a web server, you don't need to know what FastCGI is, etc.

If you pay for a host that has all this setup and SCP/FTP your files to it sure, but is that -really- easier than the local dev experience vs the Sprint Boot starter pack? I don't think so.

PHP has a built-in webserver for local dev.

It's harder than downloading WAMP, launching it and editing PHP files.

It's not.

https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/spring-boot.html

i.e Download IntelliJ, select Spring Boot, follow prompts to create project, press green button to run app. Click link in build output to open in browser, edit files for live reload.

To get equivalent usefulness out of PHP you would also need Laravel or some other framework, which if you want to do properly you also need Composer, etc. Ease of development is one area where Java is king these days, a LOT has changed in the last decade.

> i.e Download IntelliJ, select Spring Boot, follow prompts to create project, press green button to run app. Click link in build output to open in browser, edit files for live reload.

You're right, they are now at the same point in terms of ease of development. Deployment is close too (fat jar vs php files), though PHP still has shared hosting. And sure, Spring boot has more things that vanilla PHP.

This feels a lot like comparing languages based on “hello, world” programs.

> Uploading a single standalone PHP file you wrote to your 5$ webhost via SFTP, with _no other work required_ and just seeing your code run on your website? Show me how to do that exact thing in almost any other web programming language. You can't.

You can do this with Go and you don’t even need your webhost to have any special language support. Moreover, that single file can be an entire program, not just a single source file.

But why would anyone make a big deal out of a slightly simpler (not necessarily better) deployment story? In any bigger project than a personal blog or stuff like that, deployment is merely tiny fraction of the process. If 5x the time is required to make things stable, then that is quite bad, no matter what the deployment story is.

We are talking about accessibility and ease of use as factors that power adoption.

If you want to talk about something else, we can do that too.

When it comes to agency work, with a lot of small to medium sites or API:s (in the $10k-$200k range) PHP is very convenient and there are a lot of choices when it comes to hosting and deployment. Dedicated WordPress hosts, Laravel Forge and Vapor, small hosting and VPS providers as well as AWS Lambda, AWS ElasticBeanstalk and AWS ECS to mention a few.

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