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Even ignoring the legacy systems (Wordpress, Magento...), PHP has made massive improvements compared to other old languages like Python or Ruby. The language fe

Even ignoring the legacy systems (Wordpress, Magento...), PHP has made massive improvements compared to other old languages like Python or Ruby. The language features, performance improvements, frameworks and libraries available today makes it 10 times better as a language than 10 years ago.

lowercased 8y ago
Agreed. In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks. The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios. Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas. Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evolution.html https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...
- spdionis 8y ago
  Also remember that PHP is not even competing with java/c. PHP's niche is shared with python/ruby and partially nodejs. I would say PHP blows out of the water all those 3 in backend web dev.

lowercased 8y ago

Agreed. In 2007/2008, I'd been doing PHP for 11ish years; started in early 96 with PHP/FI, with vb & notes in the early 90s before that. I kept doing some PHP, but moved primarily to spring/java (via grails). enjoyable, learned a lot, but it always felt clunky and convoluted (I never became as proficient as I wanted in that stack). After several years, I 'came back' to the PHP world. A lot of the early warts/problems were still there, but you could avoid them more or less entirely if you chose to build with the new crop of composer packages and psr-compatible frameworks. The speed of PHP7+ is comparatively amazing (which, arguably, shows how 'slow' it was before!). PHP 5.6 (2014) was roughly twice as fast as PHP 5.3 (2009). PHP 7.2 (2017) is roughly 2-3x faster than PHP 5.6. In the 8+ years I 'left' PHP (was still using it, just not as primary day to day), the performance doubled, then doubled again. Still not as fast as 'pure' java/c/whatever, but incredible improvements all the same. Given that the majority of my dev work involves a lot of 'line of business' stuff with a SQL database as a central piece, db queries are almost always the biggest performance issue, the relative speed of PHP vs other stacks was even less of an issue for my real world scenarios. Upcoming experimental JIT stuff looks to make an even bigger improvement in some areas. Some comparisons were from memory, some from https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evolution.html https://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/493-php-performance-evo...

spdionis 8y ago
Also remember that PHP is not even competing with java/c. PHP's niche is shared with python/ruby and partially nodejs. I would say PHP blows out of the water all those 3 in backend web dev.