5 ms·

How PHP will Fare in 2017?

12 points by ing33k 10y ago

johansch 10y ago
Please die?
- Bino 10y ago
  What do you prefer everyone to use instead?
  - johansch 10y ago
    My slightly elitist view: I don't think (the vast majority of) the people using PHP should build Internet-connected software at all. The risk for massive privacy intrusions caused by programmer incompetency is too great, IMO.
    - jack9 10y ago
      Your answer seems awfully ignorant (that's often what people mean by elitist). "Internet-connected" and "privacy intrusion" aren't qualified terms so I can only assume you just like to have a punching post. Not uncommon since ASP is effectively gone. It might be of some value to notice your answer wasn't related to the question.
      - johansch 10y ago
        "Qualified terms"? What is that? Google hasn't heard of the expression, so I assume you just made it up.
        jack9 10y ago
        You can assume whatever you like. There is no quality to those terms. No metrics or relative value. I know you made them up.
    - paulgrimes1 10y ago
      Pretty elitist. Also slightly outdated.
      - johansch 10y ago
        > Also slightly outdated. Yeah, cause PHP keeps getting more and more relevant each year! https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=php https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=php
    - paulgrimes1 10y ago
      Pretty elitist. Also slightly outdated.
    - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
      Hahaha I feel for your downvotes but cheers for saying something that probably needs to be said. PHP is the COBOL of web application development. It's built for an era of websites that's no longer relevant. As with perl, unless you're building onto an existing project there's better options now for almost anything. I don't know of of any major dev consulting shop building stuff with PHP anymore. The likes of C#, Java, Node, Python, Go, and Ruby makes PHP an afterthought.
xiaoma 10y ago
I'd say the future is bright, especially considering the performance increases in PHP7. Now it's both super productive with its huge ecosystem and fast enough for any but the very largest of sites.
jdpedrie 10y ago
> The first and the most probable trend is the complete dominance of PHP 7.x in all aspects of PHP development. I don't see how this conclusion follows from anything in the article. As long as big players (specifically WordPress) hold down minimum version requirements, and shared hosting providers decline to upgrade, a very large percentage of PHP will still be run in pre-7.0 environments. The professional PHP types will go to 7.0, but people developing commercially for WordPress are kind of stuck. And people developing professionally for WordPress are ~25% of the PHP ecosystem, if I had to guess. As much as it pains me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it take until 2019 or 2020 for PHP7 to truly displace PHP 5.x. It took PHP 4 that long to disappear.
- memco 10y ago
  I agree that it will take a while to see 5.x disappear, but hopefully not as long. I know there are many hosting companies that are lagging behind the times, but it should move faster since the market affords easier upgrade paths. The shared host that I have been using for years has had the option to migrate easily from 5.x to newer releases and now has 7 available. They took years to support reasonable versions of 5, but now it's a two-click process to switch versions and you can even downgrade. I am shocked that there are still hosts who haven't implemented easier PHP upgrade options and why people would continue to pay them for service when for the same price they could get better service. Old habits, lock-in or neglect will slow down PHP 7 adoption, not access or financial burden.
conradfr 10y ago
I think PHP needs to get async/await as soon as possible. I don't know how well it works in Hack but PHP7 was supposed to be written with asynchronous tasks in mind but I didn't see anything concrete since then. A lot of NodeJs code is written just to parallelize API/DB calls and I'm sure PHP would be sufficient in a lot of cases. I know there's libraries but good luck getting widespread enterprise adoption of those.

12 points by ing33k 10y ago

johansch 10y ago

Please die?

Bino 10y ago
What do you prefer everyone to use instead?
- johansch 10y ago
  My slightly elitist view: I don't think (the vast majority of) the people using PHP should build Internet-connected software at all. The risk for massive privacy intrusions caused by programmer incompetency is too great, IMO.
  - jack9 10y ago
    Your answer seems awfully ignorant (that's often what people mean by elitist). "Internet-connected" and "privacy intrusion" aren't qualified terms so I can only assume you just like to have a punching post. Not uncommon since ASP is effectively gone. It might be of some value to notice your answer wasn't related to the question.
    - johansch 10y ago
      "Qualified terms"? What is that? Google hasn't heard of the expression, so I assume you just made it up.
      - jack9 10y ago
        You can assume whatever you like. There is no quality to those terms. No metrics or relative value. I know you made them up.
  - paulgrimes1 10y ago
    Pretty elitist. Also slightly outdated.
    - johansch 10y ago
      > Also slightly outdated. Yeah, cause PHP keeps getting more and more relevant each year! https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=php https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=php
  - paulgrimes1 10y ago
    Pretty elitist. Also slightly outdated.
  - nrjdhsbsid 10y ago
    Hahaha I feel for your downvotes but cheers for saying something that probably needs to be said. PHP is the COBOL of web application development. It's built for an era of websites that's no longer relevant. As with perl, unless you're building onto an existing project there's better options now for almost anything. I don't know of of any major dev consulting shop building stuff with PHP anymore. The likes of C#, Java, Node, Python, Go, and Ruby makes PHP an afterthought.

xiaoma 10y ago

I'd say the future is bright, especially considering the performance increases in PHP7. Now it's both super productive with its huge ecosystem and fast enough for any but the very largest of sites.

jdpedrie 10y ago

> The first and the most probable trend is the complete dominance of PHP 7.x in all aspects of PHP development. I don't see how this conclusion follows from anything in the article. As long as big players (specifically WordPress) hold down minimum version requirements, and shared hosting providers decline to upgrade, a very large percentage of PHP will still be run in pre-7.0 environments. The professional PHP types will go to 7.0, but people developing commercially for WordPress are kind of stuck. And people developing professionally for WordPress are ~25% of the PHP ecosystem, if I had to guess. As much as it pains me, I wouldn't be surprised to see it take until 2019 or 2020 for PHP7 to truly displace PHP 5.x. It took PHP 4 that long to disappear.

memco 10y ago
I agree that it will take a while to see 5.x disappear, but hopefully not as long. I know there are many hosting companies that are lagging behind the times, but it should move faster since the market affords easier upgrade paths. The shared host that I have been using for years has had the option to migrate easily from 5.x to newer releases and now has 7 available. They took years to support reasonable versions of 5, but now it's a two-click process to switch versions and you can even downgrade. I am shocked that there are still hosts who haven't implemented easier PHP upgrade options and why people would continue to pay them for service when for the same price they could get better service. Old habits, lock-in or neglect will slow down PHP 7 adoption, not access or financial burden.

conradfr 10y ago

I think PHP needs to get async/await as soon as possible. I don't know how well it works in Hack but PHP7 was supposed to be written with asynchronous tasks in mind but I didn't see anything concrete since then. A lot of NodeJs code is written just to parallelize API/DB calls and I'm sure PHP would be sufficient in a lot of cases. I know there's libraries but good luck getting widespread enterprise adoption of those.