Because Elixir has transparent parallelism and trivially scales to 2000 reqs/second on a $5 VPS even though it's a dynamic language, oh and because it has LiveView which eliminates the need for most of the JS in a project (if latency isn't critical), so now a backender can take care of 100% of a web project.
I worked with PHP 9-10 years ago. Still not impressed to this day. Why should I use it? Terrible type coercion that can and will catch you with your pants down is my chief complaint -- that alone is enough for me to never touch it again. I want predictable tools, not something I actively have to fight against so I can get my job done. How is this even considered productive?
So tell me again, why should I use PHP? How will it truly help me? What does it do better than everyone else?
But companies might want to use PHP, because it has a rich ecosystem, which handles corner cases.
Chances are, if you want to send out bulk email, or connect to a payment provider, there's going to be a library in PHP that allows you to do that, often with long term support from an agency.
A corner-case I recently had was needing to decode an email. There's a function for that: quoted_printable_decode. This is a common situation for PHP. If you have some sort of issue around the web, there's likely to be a PHP solution.
And if you're a small business that needs a bit of bespoke software written, then you can easily hire someone, and know a decade later, you'll be able to hire someone if the requirements change.
Much of this can also be said of the Java ecosystem.
Just recently, I was using a small business that managed their bespoke business process built on a PHP CMS. They don't need 2000 reqs/second.
It's not that I never tried anything else. I got through 8 languages and made what I feel is an informed choice.
> Much of this can also be said of the Java ecosystem.
And yet, so many programmers and companies moved on from both Java and PHP to other tech and are managing very well. The company I work for has mere 6 backenders and we serve millions of visitors regularly without ever hitting >70% CPU on 3-4 servers.
Citing the entrenched state of affairs is not an argument either. It's an appeal to statistics (a good chunk of which are flawed as well).
I'm not going to try and convince anyone to stop using PHP or Java. Truth is, most programmers want stable predictable careers and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. I simply am not in that group.
> So tell me again, why should I use PHP? How will it truly help me? What does it do better than everyone else?
I gave some reasons, citing problem domains for which there are stable, supported solutions in PHP. e.g. payment gateways, email handling, and citing the availability of programmers who can support medium bespoke or tailored systems. This isn't an "appeal to statistics" it's a strength about the ecosystem.
Similar to Python having many solutions and libraries built around data science.
> I'm not going to try and convince anyone to stop using PHP or Java.
None of what you enumerate is game-breaking, at least in a chunk of the programming area. You seem to be referring to an area where people pay pennies + have almost zero programming experience so they want to launch a project with clicks.
Sure. In that area PHP still more or less dominates. But I thought we were discussing the actual programming?
> I thought you were asking a question.
That's exactly why I said what you quoted me on: to reassert that I am looking for a good answer on "what does PHP do better" and I am not in fact seeking to change hearts per se.
> You seem to be referring to an area where people pay pennies + have almost zero programming experience so they want to launch a project with clicks.
Over my career, I've worked with companies using PHP in sales. One of those had over a million customer subscriptions, the other was a multi-national looking at PHP for a greenfield e-commerce project. I noticed working in Europe some high-growth agencies that use PHP.
> So tell me again, why should I use PHP? How will it truly help me? What does it do better than everyone else?
> But I thought we were discussing the actual programming?
Your original question just said "use PHP". PHP is a general purpose web scripting language. It's similar to Python or Ruby. It is generally more performant and later versions have a gradual type system. It's traditionally run as a shared-nothing single-threaded script, which makes it easy to reason about, and in real life has proved to be a stable way to run things in production, as it avoid bugs that can arise around stale state, multi-threading and it keeps running if other libraries have bugs that leak memory.
Later versions have introduced a JIT and support for concurrency concepts such as fibres, as in the upcoming PHP 8.1 https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers.
Arguably, the thing that would make you use it over Python, or Ruby, is the ecosystem, especially around content management and e-commerce, as the language itself is roughly comparable to others. Also I think there are more agencies that support PHP, rather than Python or Ruby.
> It's traditionally run as a shared-nothing single-threaded script, which makes it easy to reason about, and in real life has proved to be a stable way to run things in production.
I think we have a vastly differing definition of "in production". I'll agree PHP was good enough for plenty of things, and likely still is. But good enough in general to run things in production as it's understood today? You'll find that many people will disagree with you here, not just me.
> Later versions have introduced a JIT and support for concurrency concepts such as fibres, as in the upcoming PHP 8.1 https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers.
That's what I mean, not only for PHP but for like 99% of all programming languages: they play catch-up, waaaaaaaaay too slowly and gradually, with things that should be baseline by now. Happily Erlang/Elixir are having lightweight and transparent parallelism and concurrency for a long time now. Languages like Go and Rust also progressed very well in this area so I am looking to work more with them in the future as well.
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I think you and I are not aligned on what is "successful" or "good enough". You seem to insist that statistical success speaks something of the merits of a technology, and this is where I and many others disagree: people just adapt to what's given to them. That doesn't say almost anything about if the thing is good or not. People simply get what they can. Back then PHP was available so they took that. The rest is post-hoc rationalization. Stretching the simple and isolated historical fact "people used PHP because there was nothing else viable at the time" to mean that "PHP is good and successful" is where I'll disagree with you.
But yep, we severely digressed from the original discussion. I am OK with that though.
> I think we have a vastly differing definition of "in production".
Running software that customers use, directly or indirectly.
I've supported servers running PHP and Java software in production. The shared-nothing per-request nature of PHP meant I didn't have to deal with a bug in a misbehaving library causing memory leaks and taking down the application server.
> That's what I mean, not only for PHP but for like 99% of all programming languages: they play catch-up, waaaaaaaaay too slowly and gradually, with things that should be baseline by now.
PHP's problem domain has been web-based e-commerce and content management systems. In this area, PHP powers most of the web. You'd want to use PHP in this field, over other languages. Every improvement around PHP has been to advance this goal, such as the recent addition of gradual typing. There's no question of "catching up" in this area. That it is broadening out into different areas, great.
> You seem to insist that statistical success speaks something of the merits of a technology.
If the technology doesn't have a marketing department, or large companies forcing people to use it, then arguably, this does, as otherwise people would just use something else.
There have also been many other qualitative improvements to PHP over the years. I also mentioned its shared-nothing architecture, which is a qualitative, not statistical aspect behind PHP's success, as it has proven to provide stability in production. People use PHP because in certain problem domains, it is qualitatively, and statistically (assuming you mean, it benefits historically from a wide number of successful, maintained libraries) the best tool for the job.
Elaborate? Every language can be used, I stand by that statement. Sure they have very differing levels of easiness to start with but all are usable regardless.
I mean, because I know them already and I would have to learn PHP? But I'll give examples of what I wanted to see for languages I've done amounts of work in:
*Python* A disgusting level of flexibility (probably too much). You never really get trapped into anything, you can even (but should not) overwrite functions during runtime. You can make and break all the rules. Supports a number of modalities (often badly). Really killer console-based debugging tools (I love pudb for instance).
*Elixir* Insanely durable data/process model that makes it incredibly difficult to damage a working path through a non-working one. Never have your entire web app crash again. Pattern-matching and message-passing based language makes expansion easy and low risk. Macros are best used carefully but when appropriate are a breath of fresh air.
All the languages are turning complete. By definition you can solve any problem with any of them.
