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> What is PHP like nowadays? Would anyone recommend it for new projects? It is not bad at all but since there are so many good/better alternatives I would neve

> What is PHP like nowadays? Would anyone recommend it for new projects? It is not bad at all but since there are so many good/better alternatives I would never start a fresh project with PHP nowadays. The only reason would be if you have a team with PHP experts - then PHP would be the obvious choice.

matdehaast 9y ago
Unsexy yes, but stable and works a charm for most of the scale people here will deal with. What alternative would you suggest for newer projects?
- bpicolo 9y ago
  If you’re looking towards hosting on shared style infra, php is still the choice. Also if you just have experienced PHP devs Python is a pretty great alternative - it gives you more breadth to go wide than PHP does (batch processing, hadoop, machine learning, whatever really) but really there are like 10-20 different languages in the ecosystem that are all viable candidates.
- donatj 9y ago
  Personally working with PHP at a pretty large scale (hundreds of thousands of requests per second), I think it’s scaling is far simpler, easier, and cheaper than a lot of other options I have used, in particular node. The simple threading model applies to many cores and across a large fleet of servers with basically zero effort.
- melicerte 9y ago
  Agreed 100%, someone should give names and strength compared to PHP instead of just saying alternatives are better.
krapp 9y ago
I don't know whether the alternatives are objectively better, except maybe in certain domains. Mostly, people seem not to like PHP because they find it ugly and awkward... which is valid, but subjective. The major alternatives (JS, Ruby and Python) have documentation, frameworks and reasonably comprehensible paths to an MVP, although one could argue that PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment. Everything seems to have converged and normalized to the point that the factors affecting one's choices primarily have less to do with the language itself and more to do with the ability to hire for it, and whether or not you like significant whitespace.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  > The major alternatives (JS, Ruby and Python) I strongly disagree with this statement. 10 years ago this would be correct, but as you said yourself the tooling is so normalised that pretty much everything is an alternative to PHP.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > although one could argue that PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment It takes less than a minute to deploy apps on heroku/whatever. Deployment speed is not really a relevant factor now, everything is fast.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    Is there an equivalent of something like WAMP, but using Heroku?
    - ryannevius 9y ago
      These are two completely different things... WAMP is a Windows web development environment; it is a simple way to install / run Apache2, MySQL, and PHP on your Windows machine for local development. Heroku is a deployment solution which packages an app’s code and dependencies into virtualized Linux containers that are designed to execute code based on user-specified commands.
- ergo14 9y ago
  > PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment When it comes to securing the deployment I think Python/Ruby would be better though - if you factor that in I would say it would be faster for me to deploy a python app than configure php to be secure.
  - krapp 9y ago
    That's probably true - other languages benefit from learning from PHP's mistakes and requiring a framework to begin with to enforce a lot of the safety that PHP doesn't have out of the box, and that's not mentioning any safety that would come from the language itself. People say PHP is a framework, but as a framework it's terrible enough that you still need a framework for the framework.

matdehaast 9y ago

Unsexy yes, but stable and works a charm for most of the scale people here will deal with. What alternative would you suggest for newer projects?

bpicolo 9y ago
If you’re looking towards hosting on shared style infra, php is still the choice. Also if you just have experienced PHP devs Python is a pretty great alternative - it gives you more breadth to go wide than PHP does (batch processing, hadoop, machine learning, whatever really) but really there are like 10-20 different languages in the ecosystem that are all viable candidates.
donatj 9y ago
Personally working with PHP at a pretty large scale (hundreds of thousands of requests per second), I think it’s scaling is far simpler, easier, and cheaper than a lot of other options I have used, in particular node. The simple threading model applies to many cores and across a large fleet of servers with basically zero effort.
melicerte 9y ago
Agreed 100%, someone should give names and strength compared to PHP instead of just saying alternatives are better.

krapp 9y ago

I don't know whether the alternatives are objectively better, except maybe in certain domains. Mostly, people seem not to like PHP because they find it ugly and awkward... which is valid, but subjective. The major alternatives (JS, Ruby and Python) have documentation, frameworks and reasonably comprehensible paths to an MVP, although one could argue that PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment. Everything seems to have converged and normalized to the point that the factors affecting one's choices primarily have less to do with the language itself and more to do with the ability to hire for it, and whether or not you like significant whitespace.

romanovcode 9y ago
> The major alternatives (JS, Ruby and Python) I strongly disagree with this statement. 10 years ago this would be correct, but as you said yourself the tooling is so normalised that pretty much everything is an alternative to PHP.
bpicolo 9y ago
> although one could argue that PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment It takes less than a minute to deploy apps on heroku/whatever. Deployment speed is not really a relevant factor now, everything is fast.
- Angostura 9y ago
  Is there an equivalent of something like WAMP, but using Heroku?
  - ryannevius 9y ago
    These are two completely different things... WAMP is a Windows web development environment; it is a simple way to install / run Apache2, MySQL, and PHP on your Windows machine for local development. Heroku is a deployment solution which packages an app’s code and dependencies into virtualized Linux containers that are designed to execute code based on user-specified commands.
ergo14 9y ago
> PHP is still slightly better in terms of speed of deployment When it comes to securing the deployment I think Python/Ruby would be better though - if you factor that in I would say it would be faster for me to deploy a python app than configure php to be secure.
- krapp 9y ago
  That's probably true - other languages benefit from learning from PHP's mistakes and requiring a framework to begin with to enforce a lot of the safety that PHP doesn't have out of the box, and that's not mentioning any safety that would come from the language itself. People say PHP is a framework, but as a framework it's terrible enough that you still need a framework for the framework.