just to chime in on this, modern PHP is nothing like what people remember from the pre ROR days, i still use it to this day and the major frameworks and libs are really well written to the point i feel some are even over engineered and almost looking like Java (just take a look at the latest Guzzle PHP Library)
As my PHP fluent colleague said to me - don't bother learning PHP or you will end up having to fix (our) Wordpress sites and thats a nightmare. We have a Python application, and while its not written well, the PHP sites we have seem to be a fair bit worse even the ones not done in Wordpress.
Wordpress is horrible. Never going to touch that again (Senior PHP Dev myself) or anything else like it (Magento, Drupal,...).
And yes there is a lot of horrible PHP code out there, writting by bad developers. I guess newer or not as accessible languages don't have as many bad devs as PHP/JS.
But if you have good devs, I prefer a good PHP codebase to any other language that I have come across (I tried a lot of them).
Around 2001 I felt jaded with the industry and determined to do whatever was expedient to earn money. That meant using PHP, because that was purportedly the place to be at the time.
I have never felt so uninspired by a language. My overwhelming feeling from the get-go was that it was a collection of libraries, which would be fine -- but why create a new language?
PHP has the rare distinction among languages of not containing any novel features or ideas. Not only that, but it borrows liberally from several other languages, resulting in an overabundance of syntax. Instead of a tool for attacking problems, it's a reheated leftover. There is not suggestion of a better or worse way to accomplish some goal.
Finally, the original premise of PHP, interspersed functional code and HTML, is high on my list of really bad ideas. Code written in this style is doubly-challenged in terms of reuse and maintainability. Again, there is again no semblance of better or worse with this approach. If you had Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds produce the same website with PHP, there would be very little in common between their approaches.
Given the success of Facebook et al, I presume that the interspersed code/html thing has been superseded, and further that the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed. But the picture in my mind's eye is something that lumbers along despite its thorough mediocrity. I will allow that making PHP adequately consistent and secure are impressive feats.
Since when did something need to have novel features or ideas in order to be productive?
I'll counter that one of the main reasons PHP became such a used language (other than ease of deploy) is exactly the reasons you dislike it. There are multiple ways to do things - that coincide with the ways you do things in many other languages (which it steals from).
You dont have to learn anything radically new to use it, and that makes it very easy to do things quickly.
It's easy, fast (both Development speed and Page Views), and can deploy anywhere with a few clicks? It has no novel concepts that require learning something new. It has a plethora of existing code, documentation, frameworks, and StackOverflow answers to solve almost any problem (albeit, not always correctly).
Its the lowest barrier to entry web language - and honestly, I'm ok with people writing shit PHP. It gets good Ideas out there quickly - allowing the business to grow without a focus on the Development. This creates opportunities for sharp developers to come in and work on proven ideas.
2001 was 15 years ago. PHP looks completely different now. It looks very much like Java with -> instead of dots and a few differences.
Nobody sanes mixes HTML and PHP code anymore these days. Most people are using Twig for templating or at least something similar. Everything (decent) is object oriented these days.
So your views were correct 15 years ago, but have a look with fresh eyes and you will see something completely different.
Not disagreeing with you, the "javafication" of PHP has been going on for a while now (for better or for worse), but pluck your average person using PHP out from a crowd and they are still writing code like it's 2001.
If you pick an average person, then yes maybe. But that's because it's so widely used by non-developers.
But if you narrow that down to actual developers who have a job working on a product, not someone hacking a wordpress template, then it will look much different.
Not saying the average PHP developer is great at OOP, but at least things are moving into that direction. And the code quality has come very far since 2001, just look at at current open source libraries (see packagist.org) and compare them to old PHP code.
I agree with this sentiment very strongly. I understand that there's a lot of hate, flamebait, etc etc about the language, with which from my own experience I agree with or disagree with in fairly equal parts. At this stage, I have written more large web projects in PHP than any other language (for varying reasons). I don't proselytize on why it is (or is not) a good language. But for me, personally, a huge chunk of whether I'm happy or not comes from whether I feel inspired while I'm working. Quite separate from the excitement of solving problems: while working with Rust or Python, I get excited, and am generally happy (even when fighting with Rust's compiler); while working with PHP, I tend to feel vaguely annoyed. Take from that what you will.
I'm of the opinion that the best tool for the job is the one you know how to use, and in the real world of deadlines and opportunity cost, if you get a great PHP dev to write your application in Python it's going to be far more expensive and far worse than if it had been written in PHP. But it's also going to be far less fun to both write and maintain. I think you have to make your language decision depending on your priorities.
> the egregious security issues in PHP have been fixed
This I strongly disagree with. And I don't think it's possible. It's not that the existence of the language includes vulnerabilities, it just makes it extremely difficult to write applications securely. I actually teach an upper-division university class on Network and Application Security, I am writing my PhD dissertation on the topic. I have worked on the internal security team of a very large company, and I have worked as a penetration tester / security auditor. I am very familiar with the vulnerabilities that plague web applications. And I still occasionally find the odd XSS vulnerability, timing concurrency attack, etc. in PHP code that I myself have written. And most PHP applications are not written by people with my background.
There's a talk at lara-con on using collections to replace just about all loops, and it's pretty insightful and makes code so much more readable and enjoyable.
PHP by itself can be ugly -- but the Laravel community has created something beautiful from what used to be akin to horse shit.
I'm a php dev, and as much as I try going to Rails/Django -- I keep coming back to Laravel. W/ Laravel + composer PHP finally grew up, wordpress is a hacky out-dated should-be-shot-and-replaced beast. The best way of modern web dev in my opinion is to use Vue or Angular for the frontend, and laravel as a backend. PHP 7.0 is extremely fast and proficient, and it's an easy framework to pick up.
If you need anything more resilient server side then I'd recommend using a Golang or Elixir framework like Phoenix which has multi-threading.
It has most of the OOP things that I want in a language (interfaces for one, looking at you python), few things still missing but hopefully coming soon (generics, nullable typehints). And it has sane nulls in my opinion, compared to Java at least.
In the end good PHP code ends up looking like good Java code I think. But you don't have to worry about everything being nullable.
But then horrible PHP code is something else... Luckily I don't really have to touch that very often.
> As my PHP fluent colleague said to me - don't bother learning PHP or you will end up having to fix (our) Wordpress sites and thats a nightmare.
This is my life right now... lol
It's not so bad, but the frustrating part is when I talk to people in interviews about all of the great work I'm doing modernizing (the surrounding) WordPress infrastructure and the tools I've built for it, their eyes just glaze over.
I frequently get told "you're a talented developer and you're wasting your time working at X". Well, at least at my job I get to remove technical debt constantly. I don't feel like that's the case at these places I'm interviewing.
Which is a shame. I recently started toying with C#, and most of the syntax is eerily similar to PHP7. Obviously the standard library is completely different, but so far I'm right at home with the core language (though I haven't explored more advanced features yet).
Luckily I'm currently working with a PHP7 app, so all is good, but my next app will likely not be PHP at all.
This is true, it seems like the different languages are starting to converge. C# and Java are converging as well. There are still major differences, but it's getting to be like bickering siblings rather than comparing unrelated strangers.
My day job is no longer to write code, but I have a couple of projects I work on at night, so take my opinion for what it's worth. I have one project that's mostly static content and a couple of calculator forms. On submit, I an ajax call to post to a PHP script, it returns a json object with some data, and I display it. When I see PHP getting ripped, I always wonder, what am I supposed to use if not this? I know this is relatively simple, but my choices were to do the calculations in javascript or let PHP handle it - and PHP seemed to me as the right choice because I eventually may want to capture some of the input data, send it to a db, etc.
My understanding is that the majority of PHP jobs out there are maintaining old, outdated, and bad codebases using an old version of PHP so a lot of people just don't bother.
There is probably some truth to this. Every single contract I have been offered in the past 2 years including the one I am currently working required PHP5.6 & 7 knowledge, git, composer, JS, the latest JS frameworks, etc. Start the job... PHP5.3 codebase w/ some old jQuery. Its an absolute nightmare. I have to go home at night and write in PHP7 just to maintain some level of sanity or I'd have to cry myself to sleep. The only thing that makes the job tolerable is that I was able to load xdebug on the dev environments (though it doesn't always work b/c of all the redirects - it still is good enough to get me 90% of the way there).
