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What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability? I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday w

What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability? I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday white-label cPanel/Plesk-based web-hosting accounts in the very early 2000s that really gave PHP the mindshare of enthusiastic users and thus its staying power. But it's 2021 now: all the kids are getting started with NodeJS for server-side web-applications, not PHP. With the decline of traditional web-hosting as something that people have and might experiment with (replaced at the low-end by Wix and Squarespace, and major "Cloud" providers at the high-end), what opportunities does PHP have to attract new eyeballs? Years ago self-hosted WordPress and phpBB installs would have been been a good gateway, but both of those are going out of fashion owing to the substantial maintenance burden that comes with self-hosting. Everyone I know that used to self-host WordPress (former clients, friends, local small businesses, etc) have all given-up and switched to WordPress.com's managed-hosting model or gone with the aforementioned Wix and Squarespace. Ultimately PHP as-we-know-it will last as long as Zend (UPDATE: it's now owned by Perforce?!? wow...) can secure sales/support funding, which is predicated on their continued penetration of major enterprise customers - or indirectly through the continued popularity of WordPress and the like, even if it's hardly ever self-hosted anymore. Personally, my money's on maybe 5-10 years' continued credibility, and then another 15 years of slow decline into irrelevance.

mmaunder 5y ago
80% of the web is powered by PHP and 40% of that is WordPress which has continued to grow. 64% of CMS websites are WordPress. There’s what gets upvotes, and then there’s what is widely used, supported, easy to hire devs for and practical as hell. PHP, unlike Perl which I used to contribute to, is here to stay.
marcodiego 5y ago
There's also Moodle which got extremely more important because of the pandemic. Nothing that ever becomes as popular as PHP and continues evolving for 2+ decades disappears quickly. I think 10+15 years... I don't know... I think it will last longer. COBOL and FORTRAN are still alive, there was more heavy money into both but there are more minds in PHP.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  Ah, yes - Moodle. My 6th Form experimented with Moodle when I was a student there - that was a loooooong time ago (2004? 2006?). I remember the staff weren't happy that Moodle allowed students to set their own avatars because too many kids figured out you could use animated GIFs as avatars, probably copied from eBaums or deviantArt; while others uploaded shock-images or just controversial content because I guess that's just funny to a bunch of 16yos. The school ditched the experiment after a few months because Moodle simply wasn't delivering any real value: the teachers didn't want to have to type-up their handwritten lesson-plans and manually scan-in their existing non-digitized content, and those that did already have digitized content (those smug 6th Form computer science teachers, naturally) didn't want to have to "refactor" (I guess that's the right word?) their content to fit into Moodle's way-of-doing-things. I think as the experiment came to an end we were only using it for ungraded quiz-taking - we weren't even using it for submitting homework (teachers still preferred e-mail for that: the 6th Form already had its own on-prem MS Exchange set-up that everyone used - and we could e-mail staff from our personal e-mail accounts too, which was nice - I know a lot of schools kept closed, on-prem-only, not-internet-facing e-mail systems to avoid spam - this was back when spam filters were awful and spam itself regularly included actual porn and other very-inappropriate-for-schools content, so I can understand why those other schools did). ---------- I haven't laid-eyes Moodle ever since then - every few years someone will mention it but I've never had a chance to speak to anyone who actually uses it to find out if it's actually any better than it was 15 years ago - and how it's changed at all. Can you fill me in? And still far better than Blackboard?
  - znpy 5y ago
    My university is currently using moodle, as far as I can see it's working fine. It's replacing and older custom application, built on liferay (or alfresco? can't really remember). However, it's doing okay. And it's scaling fairly big (~40-45k users).
  - tpxl 5y ago
    We used moodle in uni cca 10 years ago and it worked fine. Did online quizzes/exams, homework submission, forums, lecture notes, ...
Gigachad 5y ago
Personally I am delighted that the low end has been replaced by fully managed platforms. The average small business does not have the ability to run a website. Actually building the site and getting it online is the cheapest and easiest part but its the only part these places budget for. Then the inevitable problems come when the site is 2 years old, falling apart, getting hacked, etc. Allowing these low end customers to just have something that is set and forget truly is an improvement.
tored 5y ago
PHP bigwigs just announced the PHP Foundation to secure PHP’s future. Announcement https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundation/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundati... PHP Foundation https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation Accepts donations to help the development of PHP.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  I don't think that's a good sign. The community's complaints with PHP are far more concerned with technical matters relating to the language, runtime and libraries than how Zend etc have handled the usual issues in politics and project governorship. I don't think PHP has ever had a brouhaha anything like what happens in Java's JCP or the Oracle sale. Other platforms (like .NET) have their own foundations but they aren't taking seriously by the community because we all know the commercial companies that back the tooling are the ones that really matter. ...so what's the real reason for PHP suddenly switching to a Foundation-supported model? And why couldn't they entrust PHP with an existing and well-regarded foundation like Apache or FSF?
  - tored 5y ago
    If you read the announcements it explains why they are doing it. PHP is a community driven project, comparing that with C# or Java is a bit unfair because they are backed by companies worth billions. What you describe about Zend I think that is more the old days before PHP 7. I don’t have the full picture of this but my understanding is that because of the failure of PHP 6 (never released), another group of developers from the community started to work with PHP 7 and I don’t think neither of them was from Zend. Today there is an open RFC process and anyone can submit an RFC and then the core teams votes on it. If you contribute to PHP you can become a member of the core team. https://wiki.php.net/rfc https://wiki.php.net/rfc If you want to be part of the discussion you can join the internals mailing list. Here you can read it without joining. https://externals.io/ https://externals.io/ If someone is unhappy with direction of PHP my advice to them is to start contributing, bug fix, write documentation, translate, write RFCs, implement functionality, code review etc. Why? because PHP today is a community driven project.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
emodendroket 5y ago
My impression is that the market for PHP development is almost a separate ecosystem from other languages.

mmaunder 5y ago

80% of the web is powered by PHP and 40% of that is WordPress which has continued to grow. 64% of CMS websites are WordPress. There’s what gets upvotes, and then there’s what is widely used, supported, easy to hire devs for and practical as hell. PHP, unlike Perl which I used to contribute to, is here to stay.

marcodiego 5y ago

There's also Moodle which got extremely more important because of the pandemic. Nothing that ever becomes as popular as PHP and continues evolving for 2+ decades disappears quickly. I think 10+15 years... I don't know... I think it will last longer. COBOL and FORTRAN are still alive, there was more heavy money into both but there are more minds in PHP.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
Ah, yes - Moodle. My 6th Form experimented with Moodle when I was a student there - that was a loooooong time ago (2004? 2006?). I remember the staff weren't happy that Moodle allowed students to set their own avatars because too many kids figured out you could use animated GIFs as avatars, probably copied from eBaums or deviantArt; while others uploaded shock-images or just controversial content because I guess that's just funny to a bunch of 16yos. The school ditched the experiment after a few months because Moodle simply wasn't delivering any real value: the teachers didn't want to have to type-up their handwritten lesson-plans and manually scan-in their existing non-digitized content, and those that did already have digitized content (those smug 6th Form computer science teachers, naturally) didn't want to have to "refactor" (I guess that's the right word?) their content to fit into Moodle's way-of-doing-things. I think as the experiment came to an end we were only using it for ungraded quiz-taking - we weren't even using it for submitting homework (teachers still preferred e-mail for that: the 6th Form already had its own on-prem MS Exchange set-up that everyone used - and we could e-mail staff from our personal e-mail accounts too, which was nice - I know a lot of schools kept closed, on-prem-only, not-internet-facing e-mail systems to avoid spam - this was back when spam filters were awful and spam itself regularly included actual porn and other very-inappropriate-for-schools content, so I can understand why those other schools did). ---------- I haven't laid-eyes Moodle ever since then - every few years someone will mention it but I've never had a chance to speak to anyone who actually uses it to find out if it's actually any better than it was 15 years ago - and how it's changed at all. Can you fill me in? And still far better than Blackboard?
- znpy 5y ago
  My university is currently using moodle, as far as I can see it's working fine. It's replacing and older custom application, built on liferay (or alfresco? can't really remember). However, it's doing okay. And it's scaling fairly big (~40-45k users).
- tpxl 5y ago
  We used moodle in uni cca 10 years ago and it worked fine. Did online quizzes/exams, homework submission, forums, lecture notes, ...

Gigachad 5y ago

Personally I am delighted that the low end has been replaced by fully managed platforms. The average small business does not have the ability to run a website. Actually building the site and getting it online is the cheapest and easiest part but its the only part these places budget for. Then the inevitable problems come when the site is 2 years old, falling apart, getting hacked, etc. Allowing these low end customers to just have something that is set and forget truly is an improvement.

tored 5y ago

PHP bigwigs just announced the PHP Foundation to secure PHP’s future. Announcement https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundation/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/2021/11/the-php-foundati... PHP Foundation https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation https://opencollective.com/phpfoundation Accepts donations to help the development of PHP.

DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
I don't think that's a good sign. The community's complaints with PHP are far more concerned with technical matters relating to the language, runtime and libraries than how Zend etc have handled the usual issues in politics and project governorship. I don't think PHP has ever had a brouhaha anything like what happens in Java's JCP or the Oracle sale. Other platforms (like .NET) have their own foundations but they aren't taking seriously by the community because we all know the commercial companies that back the tooling are the ones that really matter. ...so what's the real reason for PHP suddenly switching to a Foundation-supported model? And why couldn't they entrust PHP with an existing and well-regarded foundation like Apache or FSF?
- tored 5y ago
  If you read the announcements it explains why they are doing it. PHP is a community driven project, comparing that with C# or Java is a bit unfair because they are backed by companies worth billions. What you describe about Zend I think that is more the old days before PHP 7. I don’t have the full picture of this but my understanding is that because of the failure of PHP 6 (never released), another group of developers from the community started to work with PHP 7 and I don’t think neither of them was from Zend. Today there is an open RFC process and anyone can submit an RFC and then the core teams votes on it. If you contribute to PHP you can become a member of the core team. https://wiki.php.net/rfc https://wiki.php.net/rfc If you want to be part of the discussion you can join the internals mailing list. Here you can read it without joining. https://externals.io/ https://externals.io/ If someone is unhappy with direction of PHP my advice to them is to start contributing, bug fix, write documentation, translate, write RFCs, implement functionality, code review etc. Why? because PHP today is a community driven project.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

emodendroket 5y ago

My impression is that the market for PHP development is almost a separate ecosystem from other languages.