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I do not think PHP is a good language to use in a project. - dev recruitment is hard. - dev retention is hard. - hard to find people that write clean, modern

I do not think PHP is a good language to use in a project. - dev recruitment is hard. - dev retention is hard. - hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP - it is PHP, with everything that it entails. It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language.

jraph 6y ago
Do you have evidences to back up these claims? Many PHP projects are successful. WordPress, Nextcloud, Wikipedia, Facebook... Something about it must be right.
- adevx 6y ago
  I think the OP has a fair point. I could be way off but I feel few developer get excited about working on PHP projects. I jumped ship to Node.js around PHP 5 and haven't enjoyed working on PHP code bases ever since. I think this in part could be due to TypeScript, giving much more confidence in refactoring and moving a project forward. The massive npm module ecosystem is probably also a major factor. The fact that WordPress and Facebook use PHP is more historic then being exemplary for it being an excellent solution.
blahyawnblah 6y ago
None of your list says anything about the language. It says more about the companies hiring. What does PHP entail??
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Erlang, Haskell and OCaml are excelent languages. But good luck assembling a team that can use those languages. e.g.: 30 developers in 1 year. And those languages are pretty popular compared to others. The programming language you use is a important factor when it comes to scaling your team (and your product, and your business). I do not want to start a bikeshedding holy war. The reference implementation of PHP is pretty inferior to that of other scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, Julia and Node. There are other implementations that are better but come at a compatibility cost.
  - krob 6y ago
    I don't agree with this. I'm not going to get into a holy war, but I soundly disagree that it's inferior. Any C/C++/Java programmer can become productive with php very rapidly. The callstacks are familiar to programmers, the language continues to get faster & faster as older legacy structures are replaced with smarter data-structures allowing for JIT optimizations.
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
      There are more Java jobs than PHP jobs and Java jobs usually pay better than PHP jobs.
krob 6y ago
Dev recruitment is hard to find php developers? wtf are you smoking? I think a lot of this is highly dependent on where you are. My guess is you mostly deal with non php languages?
- pantelisk 6y ago
  > dev recruitment is hard. No way. It is pretty easy. To be fair it is harder in the Bay Area than let's say Europe, but it is still a non-issue. Also, the language is extremely easy to pick up, everyone is able to understand the code. This week for example I 've had an ios dev that is using Obj-C/Swift just dig into the code themselves to get clarity on an endpoint's execution. > dev retention is hard. Never really had an issue there. > hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP This also has not been a problem in the past few years. For context, I 've had multiple devs excited and pushing to start using new PHP8 features, already (and I had to be the boring one and ask to wait for hotfixes, a version .1 or .2 and see how stable and secure 8.x is first). > It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language. This is true. I 've met people who refuse to even look at PHP code, even though they are paid to do so (they might even refuse at the detriment of their peers). I 've never seen a "this is beneath me" attitude with any other tool or language before. (except perhaps the hate SQL databases got in 2015-2016) So yeah, the hate runs deep.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    I had PHP listed among my Linkedin skills and never once in over 10 years a recruiter contacted me on Linkedin asking me to apply for a PHP job. I have been contacted for every single of my other skills, even F# which is one of the most rarely used languages ever.
acomjean 6y ago
PHP is incredibly easy for any competent programmer to pick up. If you know C/Java you can get into php pretty easily. If you use structured projects, (symfony) in our case its much easier to use and maintain. We have older Java and Perl and Python to maintain. Its much harder to get those up and running. The startup I worked at 8 years ago used PHP and got bought. I think the ability to get into it quickly and get something running is underrated frankly.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  PHP was the most competitive when ASP was around. After that, PHP entered a dark age where almost every other language ran circles around it in terms of performance, security, maintainability, tool support... and literally everything. Some of those problems got addressed but by the time that happened PHP's reputation was irreversibly trashed and now nobody wants to know about it. That is the world we live in. People do not want to learn PHP or work in PHP. Do a survey on any higher education institution and verify it yourself. All the features you feel proud about... go take a look at the Java VM, .NET VM or a JS VM like V8... Those VMs are much more powerful than the PHP interpreter will ever be. Even CPython is faster. Plus, as a Java developer you can make more than a PHP developer and there are more types of development you can do. Mobile, backend, desktop. PHP is mostly limited to backend and it is not even the best solution for that.
  - ccajas 6y ago
    It sounds like a sad story. PHP's specialization is in rendering dynamic web pages. It was its ONLY purpose (ignoring niche projects like GTK bindings, etc). And yet even against general purpose languages/VM's (where using it for backend web is a choice, not its only purpose), PHP could not remain competent in its own class. It's like building a car designed for just one thing, to go very fast on straight roads, then a general-purpose car comes along and somehow beats this car in this category. How did it lose its grip? Did the PHP Group become too complacent being at the top?
    - 29athrowaway 6y ago
tored 6y ago
It is true that PHP has a bad reputation and that effectively limits number of potential skilled developers. Number of available developers is still high but it could be even higher if it had the same successful propaganda as JavaScript or Python. There is nothing in the language itself that should stop it from competing with any general purpose language, not anymore. I think this is the next important step for PHP, have charismatic & humorous evangelist like Douglas Crockford. Crockford’s missionary work was done during a time when JavaScript was in a big expansion because everyone wanted to write single page applications. But today there is huge JavaScript fatigue and more and more developers have start to realize that server side rendering is (back to) the future for most of the traditional web, especially in a time where time to market has become even more important. The constant churn of the JavaScript realm have now reached epidemic levels, a massive & relentless wave of deprecated and unsupported projects sweeps over every organization. Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp. I think also there have been a shift in regards to fullstack developers versus frontend & backend developers, many companies have woken up to disastrous idea of splitting frontend & backend developers into separate teams and now merging them again, as result the fullstack developer becomes more important. PHP is in my opinion best fullstack web platform you can use. Say after me, No more build steps for rendering a paragraph, no more unhandled Ajax errors, no more REST JSON apis with only the frontend as consumer, no more reimplementing the database schema in JavaScript, no more asynchronous state rendering on the same page. <Insert Braveheart meme>
- luckyshot 6y ago
  Wow, that was so on point. > Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp. That hit hard. I was reassigned to an old project from 5 years ago with an archaic framework, to refactor all the code to the "new shinny JS framework". Ironically, I was in the team that built it 5 years ago. It is dreadful. Rinse and repeat. I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I advocate against projects that need 50,000 files and a 2-minute build when you could just do with HTML/CSS, native JavaScript and a simple CRUD backend.
  - tored 6y ago
stanski 6y ago
Most of those issues can be answered with "maybe you're not paying enough".

jraph 6y ago

Do you have evidences to back up these claims? Many PHP projects are successful. WordPress, Nextcloud, Wikipedia, Facebook... Something about it must be right.

adevx 6y ago
I think the OP has a fair point. I could be way off but I feel few developer get excited about working on PHP projects. I jumped ship to Node.js around PHP 5 and haven't enjoyed working on PHP code bases ever since. I think this in part could be due to TypeScript, giving much more confidence in refactoring and moving a project forward. The massive npm module ecosystem is probably also a major factor. The fact that WordPress and Facebook use PHP is more historic then being exemplary for it being an excellent solution.

blahyawnblah 6y ago

None of your list says anything about the language. It says more about the companies hiring. What does PHP entail??

29athrowaway 6y ago
Erlang, Haskell and OCaml are excelent languages. But good luck assembling a team that can use those languages. e.g.: 30 developers in 1 year. And those languages are pretty popular compared to others. The programming language you use is a important factor when it comes to scaling your team (and your product, and your business). I do not want to start a bikeshedding holy war. The reference implementation of PHP is pretty inferior to that of other scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, Julia and Node. There are other implementations that are better but come at a compatibility cost.
- krob 6y ago
  I don't agree with this. I'm not going to get into a holy war, but I soundly disagree that it's inferior. Any C/C++/Java programmer can become productive with php very rapidly. The callstacks are familiar to programmers, the language continues to get faster & faster as older legacy structures are replaced with smarter data-structures allowing for JIT optimizations.
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago
    There are more Java jobs than PHP jobs and Java jobs usually pay better than PHP jobs.

krob 6y ago

Dev recruitment is hard to find php developers? wtf are you smoking? I think a lot of this is highly dependent on where you are. My guess is you mostly deal with non php languages?

pantelisk 6y ago
> dev recruitment is hard. No way. It is pretty easy. To be fair it is harder in the Bay Area than let's say Europe, but it is still a non-issue. Also, the language is extremely easy to pick up, everyone is able to understand the code. This week for example I 've had an ios dev that is using Obj-C/Swift just dig into the code themselves to get clarity on an endpoint's execution. > dev retention is hard. Never really had an issue there. > hard to find people that write clean, modern, performant PHP This also has not been a problem in the past few years. For context, I 've had multiple devs excited and pushing to start using new PHP8 features, already (and I had to be the boring one and ask to wait for hotfixes, a version .1 or .2 and see how stable and secure 8.x is first). > It does not enjoy the best reputation as a language. This is true. I 've met people who refuse to even look at PHP code, even though they are paid to do so (they might even refuse at the detriment of their peers). I 've never seen a "this is beneath me" attitude with any other tool or language before. (except perhaps the hate SQL databases got in 2015-2016) So yeah, the hate runs deep.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  I had PHP listed among my Linkedin skills and never once in over 10 years a recruiter contacted me on Linkedin asking me to apply for a PHP job. I have been contacted for every single of my other skills, even F# which is one of the most rarely used languages ever.

acomjean 6y ago

PHP is incredibly easy for any competent programmer to pick up. If you know C/Java you can get into php pretty easily. If you use structured projects, (symfony) in our case its much easier to use and maintain. We have older Java and Perl and Python to maintain. Its much harder to get those up and running. The startup I worked at 8 years ago used PHP and got bought. I think the ability to get into it quickly and get something running is underrated frankly.

29athrowaway 6y ago
PHP was the most competitive when ASP was around. After that, PHP entered a dark age where almost every other language ran circles around it in terms of performance, security, maintainability, tool support... and literally everything. Some of those problems got addressed but by the time that happened PHP's reputation was irreversibly trashed and now nobody wants to know about it. That is the world we live in. People do not want to learn PHP or work in PHP. Do a survey on any higher education institution and verify it yourself. All the features you feel proud about... go take a look at the Java VM, .NET VM or a JS VM like V8... Those VMs are much more powerful than the PHP interpreter will ever be. Even CPython is faster. Plus, as a Java developer you can make more than a PHP developer and there are more types of development you can do. Mobile, backend, desktop. PHP is mostly limited to backend and it is not even the best solution for that.
- ccajas 6y ago
  It sounds like a sad story. PHP's specialization is in rendering dynamic web pages. It was its ONLY purpose (ignoring niche projects like GTK bindings, etc). And yet even against general purpose languages/VM's (where using it for backend web is a choice, not its only purpose), PHP could not remain competent in its own class. It's like building a car designed for just one thing, to go very fast on straight roads, then a general-purpose car comes along and somehow beats this car in this category. How did it lose its grip? Did the PHP Group become too complacent being at the top?
  - 29athrowaway 6y ago

tored 6y ago

It is true that PHP has a bad reputation and that effectively limits number of potential skilled developers. Number of available developers is still high but it could be even higher if it had the same successful propaganda as JavaScript or Python. There is nothing in the language itself that should stop it from competing with any general purpose language, not anymore. I think this is the next important step for PHP, have charismatic & humorous evangelist like Douglas Crockford. Crockford’s missionary work was done during a time when JavaScript was in a big expansion because everyone wanted to write single page applications. But today there is huge JavaScript fatigue and more and more developers have start to realize that server side rendering is (back to) the future for most of the traditional web, especially in a time where time to market has become even more important. The constant churn of the JavaScript realm have now reached epidemic levels, a massive & relentless wave of deprecated and unsupported projects sweeps over every organization. Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp. I think also there have been a shift in regards to fullstack developers versus frontend & backend developers, many companies have woken up to disastrous idea of splitting frontend & backend developers into separate teams and now merging them again, as result the fullstack developer becomes more important. PHP is in my opinion best fullstack web platform you can use. Say after me, No more build steps for rendering a paragraph, no more unhandled Ajax errors, no more REST JSON apis with only the frontend as consumer, no more reimplementing the database schema in JavaScript, no more asynchronous state rendering on the same page. <Insert Braveheart meme>

luckyshot 6y ago
Wow, that was so on point. > Somewhere right now some poor developer inherits a Angular 1.1 project built with gulp. That hit hard. I was reassigned to an old project from 5 years ago with an archaic framework, to refactor all the code to the "new shinny JS framework". Ironically, I was in the team that built it 5 years ago. It is dreadful. Rinse and repeat. I feel like I'm doing something wrong when I advocate against projects that need 50,000 files and a 2-minute build when you could just do with HTML/CSS, native JavaScript and a simple CRUD backend.
- tored 6y ago

stanski 6y ago

Most of those issues can be answered with "maybe you're not paying enough".