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I worked at a small PHP shop for about two years. There was a ton of legacy code that was utterly terrifying: a 13-deep nested `if` and the like, global variabl

I worked at a small PHP shop for about two years. There was a ton of legacy code that was utterly terrifying: a 13-deep nested `if` and the like, global variables, etc. I convinced my boss to let me start using Laravel. It made development worlds more sane. It made development orders of magnitude easier. Laravel does a lot for you, and they’ve thought about how to solve some tricky problems in clever ways. That being said, I would never recommend PHP as the language to solve any given problem. It is now less of a terrible language and more of simply a mediocre language. I can’t think of anything it does particularly better than another language. For any given problem, there is most certainly a better language to solve it, be it Ruby, Elixir, Clojure, Rust, etc. I’ve been working with Elixir and Phoenix for web development for a few months now, and it is sooooo much better. It’s hard for me to enumerate all the things, small and large, that reduce developer friction in contrast to even PHP’s best framework.

IloveHN84 7y ago
You forgot one thing: PHP has a far larger community and packages compared to exotic languages like Elixir. Everything is documented and there are tons of resources out there to solve a problem. It's like C++ for the web. Why does C++ still live? Community, extensively tested and adopted by large organizations. Well PHP is the same. Until big companies are out there using PHP (consider Vimeo or Flixbus or Groupon as example), because it is perfomant, it will fail to die.
- ashton314 7y ago
  I agree with you: strong community support is essential in the survival of any language/technology. PHP has a large community and a dizzying number of packages. That helps a lot. But I can think of a number of languages (Python, Perl, Ruby) that also have large communities and vast numbers of libraries at their disposal. Therefore, I don't think you could pick PHP over any of those just because "it has more libraries". Furthermore, Elixir, while it has fewer libraries and a smaller community, is growing fast. The core language is also exceptionally well documented and discoverable. It has libraries that cover essentially all your common use cases. I guess what I want to say is, I'm happy PHP is getting better for all the programmers stuck using it. There's no reason to use it for anything new, because there's always a better tool out their for your job.

IloveHN84 7y ago

You forgot one thing: PHP has a far larger community and packages compared to exotic languages like Elixir. Everything is documented and there are tons of resources out there to solve a problem. It's like C++ for the web. Why does C++ still live? Community, extensively tested and adopted by large organizations. Well PHP is the same. Until big companies are out there using PHP (consider Vimeo or Flixbus or Groupon as example), because it is perfomant, it will fail to die.

ashton314 7y ago
I agree with you: strong community support is essential in the survival of any language/technology. PHP has a large community and a dizzying number of packages. That helps a lot. But I can think of a number of languages (Python, Perl, Ruby) that also have large communities and vast numbers of libraries at their disposal. Therefore, I don't think you could pick PHP over any of those just because "it has more libraries". Furthermore, Elixir, while it has fewer libraries and a smaller community, is growing fast. The core language is also exceptionally well documented and discoverable. It has libraries that cover essentially all your common use cases. I guess what I want to say is, I'm happy PHP is getting better for all the programmers stuck using it. There's no reason to use it for anything new, because there's always a better tool out their for your job.