8 ms·

Hmmm... Most points in this article are shouting "yeah we have those too!!" but it didn't give any convincing arguments why I (or anybody who doesn't already kn

• kkarpkkarp 5y ago
  for me the biggest advantage is the size of the market. I know Python and PHP quite decent but I've never found any quick job (or long time job) for my Python skills. For PHP I have to convey some of jobs to others, I am getting so much of them (I even run some job advertisement site only for the purpose to redirect people pinging me with offers, really). But maybe this is just me.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Good jobs though? Lots of PHP jobs in Canada, but the salary is nearly universally always laughably low.
    • kkarpkkarp 5y ago
      IDK what is a good salary in US/Canada, I live in European Union. My salary as WordPress developer is more than 4,5k USD/month and I see job offers with 8k USD as well (still for WP developers, this is my specialization and I know this field the most; I expect for better recognized PHP fields like modern frameworks like Laravel it could be more) And yes, 4,5k USD/month is massively good salary for Europe. On the other hand, I see many job offers with salaries being just a joke (idk if they find any good developers for such money)
      • sdevonoes 5y ago
        4,5 K USD/month is 54K USD/year gross which is 47K EUR/year gross. That's not massively good salary across ALL Europe. In eastern and southern europe: that's probably good for a junior engineer, and perhaps average for a senior In northern europe: that's probably average for a junior, below average for a senior
      • jansommer 5y ago
        I also live in the EU, and 4,5k is not a massively good salary for a programmer in my country (Denmark). This is usually what a junior is paid.
        • moooo99 5y ago
          Absolutely agree, 4.5K USD (3,970€) is certainly not a "massively good salary for Europe" although that heavily depends on the country. Here in Germany its about entry level for a CS major
          • disgruntledphd2 5y ago
            Yeah, Europe has significant variance in a) reporting of salaries (some report pre-tax, others post-tax) and median income levels. Generally though, programmers are paid pretty well by the standard of the country they live in.
        • Accacin 5y ago
          Is the 4,5k before or after tax?
      • numlock86 5y ago
        Where in the EU are good (web) devs willing to work for less than 8k USD, considering the current work market situation? I am in urgent need of those. :^)
      • ShallowCopy 5y ago
        I don't think salaries across Europe are comparable. There are huge discrepancies between locations. For example, in Berlin it seems to me that average salaries are around 70k EUR/year (6.6k USD/month) and really good salaries are well above 90k EUR/year (8.5k USD/month). You can see more data in https://www.levels.fyi https://www.levels.fyi, which it is skewed to the high side, but gives you an idea about what good offers are nowadays.
    • nicoburns 5y ago
      PHP salaries in the UK are decent. Perhaps a little lower on average than other ecosystems (the high-end has a tendency to use other languages), but I've definitely seen some well paid jobs. As a junior it may well make sense to start with PHP as there are just lots of jobs available, then you can move onto something else. There are other good options too of course.
    • herbst 5y ago
      Same here in Switzerland. And other than working on actual modern PHP these jobs are usually maintaining old software with weird custom scripting languages like typoscript xsml ... I'd consider a PHP job, but only if they quarantee they don't have any of those legacy maintaining things lying around.
      • chinathrow 5y ago
        > I'd consider a PHP job, but only if they quarantee they don't have any of those legacy maintaining things lying around. I see your point, but there is lots of legacy code (in any language) laying around and making shit tons of money for their owners - hence the need to maintain these systems.
        • herbst 5y ago
          I love maintaining old rails projects. No worries with that, MVC is making it easy to work with any project done by someone who knows the language. The language allows and encourages updating as well. It can be fun even. PHP had no common way to do anything for a long time and you still see it from people writing PHP today.
          • chinathrow 5y ago
            My point was more that if there's money being made with some chunk of code, a sensible product owner would allow a modern refactor or even a rewrite in the same language to not endanger the long term success of said app.
            • herbst 5y ago
              I see. Well personally I never witnessed such a product owner. My whole carrier with PHP legacy code evolved around 'never touch a running system' But I like the idea that these people may exist out there :)
• nick0garvey 5y ago
  The best part of PHP is the development model. You copy some files to a server, and load the page. That's it. It is really hard to beat how easy it is to iterate, even if the language is truly terrible.
  • spoiler 5y ago
    I don't see how that makes the development cycle any better. I can just edit a file, press save, and it compiles and tests run automatically. If I'm doing something in interpreted languages, the code updates in memory. Furthermore if I'm working with JS/TS, hot reloading even makes it so I don't even need to refresh the page. I can even inject code into arbitrary places with the debugger (as if I'm editing the source)! So, all these other ecosystems are on par with the PHP... I'm glad PHP adopting ideas from other communities, and that the community is becoming more cohesive, though. Aside: I used to write PHP before (back in the 3 to 5 days), and worked for a big web hosting provider that had a big shared hosting customer base; PHP was by far the most popular technology in that space.So, I'm not trying to bash on PHP.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jeroenhd 5y ago
      Javascript has come a long way, but I think there's still a different. With PHP, you install the toolchain, save a file and the page becomes available. With JS/TS, you install the toolchain, and then enter a complicated process of yarn/npm incantations in the command line to get the project working right. The manual may say "yarn add typescript" but in practice there's always more setup and configuration to be done before it works well. For "real" projects, there's not that much of a difference between yarn and composer. For getting started, though, the process is a lot more involved. Another problem is that running Javascript on the backend is almost completely different from normal frontend development. If you want to store state, you end up using the same (or even worse, a similar) programming language with completely different contexts and available libraries and methods. You can't document.createElement in the backend to tell the user that an operation succeeded or failed, even though that's what you'd do if you were working on a frontend file. With PHP, you can't do frontend, so whenever you write frontend code, you can't get confused. In my opinion, this makes learning PHP backend dev a lot easier. It's only natural that you choose to continue working in the language you've started you development career in. You can see that by the fact that there are still people who swear by VB.NET, despite everything. The JS ecosystem does have the advantage of coming with a debugger, but PHP users can get the same by hooking their PHP install into the PHPStorm debugger. I think it doesn't matter much which language you use at that point, it's just a tooling preference. All in all, I think both languages have their uses. If PHP really was as bad as people say it is, it would've died out already.
• heurisko 5y ago
  > use PHP over other decent modern languages and ecosystems There's not a lot that is comparable to the PHP ecosystem when it comes to bespoke web-based e-commerce, or anything to do with bespoke customer or content management. If you're trying to integrate with some weird 3rd party API, chances are there's going to be something written in PHP, or you can easily pay someone to do it for you. Not only this, but there are agencies providing long-term support for parts of this ecosystem. Other languages with strong ecosystems in this area would be Java, or Ruby, I think. I like Java for the same reason, and would probably like Rails. Anything that has "batteries included" is good to me.
• Klathmon 5y ago
  My favorite thing about PHP is the execution model. Every single request is brand new and runs the whole program start to finish. IMO that's extremely powerful in its simplicity and while you can get it in other languages, it feels like like a "core competency" for PHP (just like how async code is easier in javascript than in python, because JS kind of had it from day 1)
  • resonious 5y ago
    Forgive me for going a little off topic here but is it really true that JS was async-friendly from day 1? When I started using JS seriously 8 years ago, async code was horrible (callback hell, etc.) The web standards guys retrofitted native async way after the matter.
    • tylergetsay 5y ago
      async/await is just syntax sugar around promises which are a just a nice way of organizing callbacks, so yes I'd say it's true.
    • nkozyra 5y ago
      Probably more accurate to say it was async from day one. Which people probably realized the first time they had to deal with setTimeout The original promises syntax and chaining in ES6 were not particularly user friendly.
    • kall 5y ago
      Doesn‘t this more or less mean "the only execution environment is event based, has a run loop outside of your control and calls your code whenever it wants" and "there is no busy sleep". So it was callback based from day one. Is that the same as async? I think it is?
      • resonious 5y ago
        That makes sense, thanks! It has indeed been run in a loop from the start despite the poor ergonomics - I did not think of it in that light.
• lordgroff 5y ago
  Frankly my reasons for using it boil down to: 1. WordPress uses it 2. PHP is far less terrible than I remember (having used it in very early days) I manage a WP (woocommerce) site for a small business. It's not my day job, it needs to be simple. Most of the "day job" is handled by content management users. I have written a fair amount of plugins though to enable custom functionality and the process is perfectly fine. I looked at Ruby, I looked at Python, I looked at node. There's nothing as simple and, frankly, as mature aside from commercial platforms like Shopify that charge an arm and leg.
  • fooyc 5y ago
    I would not recommend anyone to use WordPress in 2021, though. WordPress maybe simple to setup, it's part of what gave PHP its bad reputation.
    • lordgroff 5y ago
      Yeah, I hear that a lot, and to me it always seems like a person curling their lip in disapproval from the nearby Ivory Tower. I honestly always wonder: as opposed to what? Let's take my simple requirement, a small business ecommerce store that's not going to look like trash and where non technical users can make pages, edit descriptions, etc. I can do: WordPress, Magento, or I can pay a SaS provider. Essentially both do it yourself approaches are PHP and Magento has really sabotaged itself with the complicated migration. SaS means higher costs and if I want custom functionality (and yes, the business needs it), it ranges from impossible to possible but a headache. So here is a business that is now online for a minimal cost for two years, allowing great flexibility for me, while allowing completely non technical users to get crap done.
• path411 5y ago
  I've used php extensively in the past decade. You could kinda of say your argument about any modern web language. If I'm already comfortable in php, .net, node, ruby, or heck even java, for making a web app, do I really "need" to learn another? Not really. Every one has a different way of doing things, sure, not every different thing is better, but it is different. I think just people like to learn about multiple, but sure, you can always be stubborn and stick with your single hammer. The two things I can think of quickly, that I like about php, over another, is the ease of code->browser. You have to manage 0 build configurations or pipelines to get what you want working. Just download the files and open a browser. The second, is 100% transparency with third party libraries. Because of the lack of ability to compile, when I download a third party library, I'm getting their actual true source, and can much easier, navigate and understand the library right through the ide, without having to read a bunch of docs online and that it's true to source. Being able to control click into third party libraries is quite liberating.
• fooyc 5y ago
  1. The develop-try cycle is fast: In PHP if you change some code it will be immediately visible - no server reload needed. That's because the "application" is reloaded at every web request. There is no application server. 2. The PHP ecosystem is quite mature, and packages are of good quality in general 3. Dependency management works well. You will rarely end up in a state where your dependencies are incompatible between each other (something that happen often with npm for instance) 4. It's faster than python/perl/ruby