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This 100%. It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. The language has matured a lot and building stuff with

This 100%. It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. The language has matured a lot and building stuff with it is simple, cheap, straightforward and fast. If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I've had these guys like this on my team and guess what, they built fancy over-engineered solutions to problems that no one had and then job hopped and left it for us to deal with. I can't speak for anyone else but I go into work every day for one purpose, and it's to ship shit which users use. I don't have room on my team for people who have other priorities. The amount of stuff you can get done with basically just PHP and Linux is amazing.

1123581321 3y ago
I love PHP, but a red flag?! If they’re busy in the Ruby/Java/C#/Go worlds (all get-it-done environments) then I’d just assume they don’t read many Hacker News praises for PHP. It’s easy to have not encountered it since the bad old days unless you work on a team that uses Laravel for some things. I do understand hiring someone who has that tradesman programming ethic and is comfortable with Linux, but that’s more requiring certain positive traits.
- vonseel 3y ago
  Exactly how I feel reading this thread, I had no idea PHP has changed so much.
- safety1st 3y ago
  Yeah, that's fair. Now that you mention it, 90% of these guys where I get that red flag instinct I described are Javascript devs or wannabe Javascript devs. It's as if the JS ecosystem has driven an entire generation of developers insane
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    I'm in complete agreement there; I've seen a number of those. I like to ask simple questions about what they like about programming to catch some of those issues and look for a certain amount of self-understanding.
keyle 3y ago
I think it's a case that unfortunately many people don't understand how simple a solution can be. They've been fed the typical books and articles and firmly believe that if it's just PHP it just can't be good. Right? I mean going through all this pain and requiring that many developers, means that this solution has to be much better? Right? On the one end of the scale you've got the PHP Laravel monolith, and on the other you've got the completely serverless bits of JS over lambdas, with 12 different technologies, buckets up the wazoo, to store 300mb worth of data. Then you're told 'yeah, but this is distributed'! Okay cool, so you save 50ms of latency. Super... How long does your javascript takes to start returning content? Right, much longer. What the hell is even a cold start? How is that a thing in 2023? PHP is unsexy. And people don't like unsexy. I, on the other hand, I like my vacations uninterrupted.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  One does not need PHP for that. Most well known traditional web framework with server side template rendering will do. But yeah, before you jump through the whole ecosystem of JS and require 3 different third party services, only to make a website, that does not work with JS turned off and cannot be build and run any longer 3 month later, due to dependency fup, you are much better off with unsexy PHP.
0xblinq 3y ago
Don't you dare to tell me that my isomorphic Node trpc graphql with redux and sagas on top of next.js with SSG and SSR and parts in server components with my home grown validation and ORM framework and still no translations because they don't work together with everything else and deployed on serverless docker lambdas to a kubernetes cluster is over engineering a landing page with a contact form. So fast! That's a state of the art WebApp. You old PHP developer!
- bilekas 3y ago
  This made me giggle because I've heard stuff like this in serious situations.
  - 0xblinq 3y ago
    Of course, it's based of my personal experience too. I'm not claiming I invented this at all.
- iknowstuff 3y ago
  You described the marketing website of my previous employer.
  - 0xblinq 3y ago
    And the marketing website of many others. It’s not a joke. Pure real life.
- creamyhorror 3y ago
  You're not using Temporal workflows? So outdated! Though to be fair, devs lose employability when they don't get to use (in their work) technologies that are gaining wide popularity. It's a balance to be struck by the CTO/architect (assuming the devs want or are able to demand that skills development in the first place).
- topicseed 3y ago
  Yeh, JS-land is wild. In a way, it's amazing that this ecosystem is so lively and fertile, but my gosh it's draining.
Demoloto 3y ago
Just 6 years ago you still were writing type hints in comments as suse annotations which was not PHP standard. So PHP was and might still be a shitty language. And PHP was my first language I'm fine with scripting with it but it was ugly as hell to write big code
- usrusr 3y ago
  And don't get me started with all the points where the syntax pretends to consume an expression but it's actually just the parser looking for a very specific pattern that will be read as if it was an expression, but other forms won't be accepted. Sure, it's perfectly possible to grow numb to those pains and some will even pat themselves on the back, claiming pragmatism over principles, but wow, if you're not used to that level of make-believe in computer languages you'll be paralyzed by disbelief. An endless series of "this can't be true!"
bzzzt 3y ago
> It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. Depends on the reasons. One good reason for preferring another language is .NET/Java business app developers can earn a lot more here than PHP developers ;)
- cies 3y ago
  Oppositely: not being able to articulate the problems with PHP/Laravel compared to a stack of say Kotlin/Ktor or C#/MVC or Java/SpringBoot is a red flag too in my book.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    Have worked at a few places where PHP was dumped on because “it doesn’t have threads”. The dumper-folks were also noted to be for spending most of their time trying to fix threading issues (Java, usually). Saw this in person twice, have heard similarly from other colleagues over the years.
    - cies 3y ago
      I agree “it doesn’t have threads” is a bullshit reason. Especially since it took JS's threadlessness to make evented (aka async, aka promise-based, aka callback-based, aka eventloop-based) mainstream, and for good reasons! It allows many to maximize the compute resources better than possible with the threaded approach. There are good reasons to avoid/switch-away-from PHP... Like weak compile time quality guarantees, messy std lib, low quality of available libraries, many security issues; all WHILE great alternatives exist for free! (e.g. Kotlin, Rust, C#, Java)
KyeRussell 3y ago
To be blunt, you are a terrible hiring manager if your red flag is “they haven’t got an up-to-date opinion about the shitty-history language that I’m personally into”. This just sounds like PHP Stockholm syndrome with extra steps.
- ofrzeta 3y ago
  I guess it depends on how it's communicated. If someone tells me he doesn't like PHP because of this and that reason, that's fine. Getting wound up about some specific programming language (feature) or any tech still raises a red flag for me. But then I might be terrible as well :)
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    I can be pretty confident that if a language is not from the ML family I’m not going to like it for all of the reasons it’s not a ML language.
  - cutler 3y ago
    Whatever happened to passionate programmers?
    - cardanome 3y ago
      One of the reasons why I love working on PHP jobs is that I get to avoid "passionate" programmers. It's fine to be excited about programming but those that build their whole identity around it are just super obnoxious and not fun to work with.
      - cutler 3y ago
        Thousands at Railsconf or Clojure Conj would disagree, I'm sure but these languages are kinda special.
    - ofrzeta 3y ago
      I am totally passionate about removing complexity from apps and stacks.
rvense 3y ago
There's plenty of stacks that I'd say qualify as "simple, cheap, straightforward, and fast" (modern Java, for instance - huge red flag to me if people still turn up their nose at Java), including some that you'd probably consider exotic (honourable mention: Elixir+Phoenix). I personally never liked PHP, so I haven't kept up with how it has developed and I don't expect to start, to be honest. Of course, if you've got an otherwise interesting project that happens to be PHP and want to pay me to help you with it, I'll be professional about it, but there are too many alternatives that appeal to me more than PHP for anything where I have a say.
gumballindie 3y ago
PHP has matured and has been a nice language for a decade now. But PHP developers havent. Cargo culting “good practice” and lack of creativity plagues the community. Frameworks have become so heavy that you spend more time configuring them than actually adding value. Oh and some still argue over setters and getters.
- notresidenter 3y ago
  That hasn't been my experience at all. Although, I do spend more time interacting with the Laravel community (a subset of the PHP community) than the PHP community itself. I found the (Laravel) community to be more about object-level discussions ("how to do x feature the best way possible") rather than meta-level discussions.
- znpy 3y ago
  But that’s kinda their point… you spend time configuring the framework instead of reimplementing from scratch and doing the plumbing yourself.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    The issue is that there is so much configuration that it’s basically coding. PHP frameworks are all bloat. It would have been much better to abstract things in a way that you actually spend time on features not thousands of configs.
    - liveoneggs 3y ago
      Then use lumen, it comes with laravel.
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        Nah, I’ll use python or other proper languages, thanks.
        3y ago
tialaramex 3y ago
PHP8. You think it's a red flag when people don't believe that PHP8 finally got their shit together. What's that George W Bush line, Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again. But we're not talking about getting fooled just once, or twice, we're talking about eight times.
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  First off, this comment reveals some ignorance about the language. PHP 6 never existed. Trying to infer anything off version numbers like this is goofy; in a much shorter time period Node is up to v20. Does 20 versus 8 mean anything? No. No one got “fooled”. The got a useful tool that got better over time.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Anybody who believes that this time PHP isn't awful can expect the same disappointment as the last few times. I'm an old man, I remember all the pain of upgrading to PHP3 and for my sins my current work includes trying to cajole somebody's PHP7.x code into running even though it appears their employer disowned the project we know if we don't make it work the "replacement" will never actually materialise. This is a language built by people who didn't really know any better, so I don't blame them, but it's ludicrous to pretend that it's a "red flag" to have noticed that this keeps happening and learned from that experience.
dgb23 3y ago
> If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I get that you are arguing from personal experiences, people you met and worked with. But this statement lacks context and nuance. There are developers who don't like PHP because of outdated reasons and possibly because they are snobs. Sure, that's a red flag. But there are many who have so many battle scars and war stories with the language and its ecosystem that they decided it's just not worth the pain anymore. Even though PHP has evolved (with regular breaking changes...) and tries its best to put something useful on top of a shaky foundation: The effort required to make PHP work with you, in comparison to other languages, becomes too large and painful. I'm not talking about superficial things here, nor do I have the tendency to overengineer stuff, quite the contrary. I'm talking about writing simple, robust and efficient code. However I would say there are three very good reasons why you should use or at least consider the language: - You want to quickly hack together something useful with minimal fuss, AKA its original purpose. - Buy-in of the OO, code generation, IoC/DI, magic framework stuff that Laravel/Symphony provide. - You have to.
- jusssi 3y ago
  > magic framework stuff that Laravel/Symphony provide The magic in these frameworks is evil, and likely a big part in ruining PHP's reputation. Laravel in particular hides way too much stuff behind magic, and when it goes wrong you find yourself sifting through OOP-obfuscated layers of framework and libraries just to find out how exactly your controller is called.
  - dgb23 3y ago
    I agree with you. But, and this is a big but, it's a tradeoff. You also get benefits. This is why I said "buy-in". If you are comfortable with doing things in their way, you get a ton of leverage: easily consistent code, a fast and productive "get off the ground" experience. The downside is what you described. Personally I'm just not a fan anymore of these things. You quickly produce code that _looks_ clean and consistent. But it's also bloated and brittle, especially if you need to break out of the happy path. A framework like that is great if you don't do software design, but more of a hindrance if you do. There's no framework that can help you do a holistic solution. For that you need good tooling, a robust foundation (AKA not PHP and probably not JS) and a simple design. Again: Trade off. That's why many here in these discussions will tell you that X or Y is the best thing since sliced bread - because it fits their needs almost perfectly. But you also get many (like us) who have at least some reservations, because had to bend over backwards to fit a square peg into a round hole and ultimately wasted so much time that using X or Y wasn't worth it at all.
switch007 3y ago
These “as a super important hiring manager” brags are quite boring to read
fsociety 3y ago
Ditto for any language. I think it is a good sign for someone to recognize the trade-offs a language makes, or even accept that they can complain about it while acknowledging they don’t understand the trade-offs. But when a dev says X is objectively bad, that is not a good sign. Languages are tools, not a way of life.
za3faran 3y ago
What about people who get their stuff done with mature, well established, and high performant Java and C# frameworks? The benefits of static languages is already established, particularly for longer maintained and larger code bases where multiple people work on them.

1123581321 3y ago

I love PHP, but a red flag?! If they’re busy in the Ruby/Java/C#/Go worlds (all get-it-done environments) then I’d just assume they don’t read many Hacker News praises for PHP. It’s easy to have not encountered it since the bad old days unless you work on a team that uses Laravel for some things. I do understand hiring someone who has that tradesman programming ethic and is comfortable with Linux, but that’s more requiring certain positive traits.

vonseel 3y ago
Exactly how I feel reading this thread, I had no idea PHP has changed so much.
safety1st 3y ago
Yeah, that's fair. Now that you mention it, 90% of these guys where I get that red flag instinct I described are Javascript devs or wannabe Javascript devs. It's as if the JS ecosystem has driven an entire generation of developers insane
- 1123581321 3y ago
  I'm in complete agreement there; I've seen a number of those. I like to ask simple questions about what they like about programming to catch some of those issues and look for a certain amount of self-understanding.

keyle 3y ago

I think it's a case that unfortunately many people don't understand how simple a solution can be. They've been fed the typical books and articles and firmly believe that if it's just PHP it just can't be good. Right? I mean going through all this pain and requiring that many developers, means that this solution has to be much better? Right? On the one end of the scale you've got the PHP Laravel monolith, and on the other you've got the completely serverless bits of JS over lambdas, with 12 different technologies, buckets up the wazoo, to store 300mb worth of data. Then you're told 'yeah, but this is distributed'! Okay cool, so you save 50ms of latency. Super... How long does your javascript takes to start returning content? Right, much longer. What the hell is even a cold start? How is that a thing in 2023? PHP is unsexy. And people don't like unsexy. I, on the other hand, I like my vacations uninterrupted.

zelphirkalt 3y ago
One does not need PHP for that. Most well known traditional web framework with server side template rendering will do. But yeah, before you jump through the whole ecosystem of JS and require 3 different third party services, only to make a website, that does not work with JS turned off and cannot be build and run any longer 3 month later, due to dependency fup, you are much better off with unsexy PHP.

0xblinq 3y ago

Don't you dare to tell me that my isomorphic Node trpc graphql with redux and sagas on top of next.js with SSG and SSR and parts in server components with my home grown validation and ORM framework and still no translations because they don't work together with everything else and deployed on serverless docker lambdas to a kubernetes cluster is over engineering a landing page with a contact form. So fast! That's a state of the art WebApp. You old PHP developer!

bilekas 3y ago
This made me giggle because I've heard stuff like this in serious situations.
- 0xblinq 3y ago
  Of course, it's based of my personal experience too. I'm not claiming I invented this at all.
iknowstuff 3y ago
You described the marketing website of my previous employer.
- 0xblinq 3y ago
  And the marketing website of many others. It’s not a joke. Pure real life.
creamyhorror 3y ago
You're not using Temporal workflows? So outdated! Though to be fair, devs lose employability when they don't get to use (in their work) technologies that are gaining wide popularity. It's a balance to be struck by the CTO/architect (assuming the devs want or are able to demand that skills development in the first place).
topicseed 3y ago
Yeh, JS-land is wild. In a way, it's amazing that this ecosystem is so lively and fertile, but my gosh it's draining.

Demoloto 3y ago

Just 6 years ago you still were writing type hints in comments as suse annotations which was not PHP standard. So PHP was and might still be a shitty language. And PHP was my first language I'm fine with scripting with it but it was ugly as hell to write big code

usrusr 3y ago
And don't get me started with all the points where the syntax pretends to consume an expression but it's actually just the parser looking for a very specific pattern that will be read as if it was an expression, but other forms won't be accepted. Sure, it's perfectly possible to grow numb to those pains and some will even pat themselves on the back, claiming pragmatism over principles, but wow, if you're not used to that level of make-believe in computer languages you'll be paralyzed by disbelief. An endless series of "this can't be true!"

bzzzt 3y ago

> It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP. Depends on the reasons. One good reason for preferring another language is .NET/Java business app developers can earn a lot more here than PHP developers ;)

cies 3y ago
Oppositely: not being able to articulate the problems with PHP/Laravel compared to a stack of say Kotlin/Ktor or C#/MVC or Java/SpringBoot is a red flag too in my book.
- lowercased 3y ago
  Have worked at a few places where PHP was dumped on because “it doesn’t have threads”. The dumper-folks were also noted to be for spending most of their time trying to fix threading issues (Java, usually). Saw this in person twice, have heard similarly from other colleagues over the years.
  - cies 3y ago
    I agree “it doesn’t have threads” is a bullshit reason. Especially since it took JS's threadlessness to make evented (aka async, aka promise-based, aka callback-based, aka eventloop-based) mainstream, and for good reasons! It allows many to maximize the compute resources better than possible with the threaded approach. There are good reasons to avoid/switch-away-from PHP... Like weak compile time quality guarantees, messy std lib, low quality of available libraries, many security issues; all WHILE great alternatives exist for free! (e.g. Kotlin, Rust, C#, Java)

KyeRussell 3y ago

To be blunt, you are a terrible hiring manager if your red flag is “they haven’t got an up-to-date opinion about the shitty-history language that I’m personally into”. This just sounds like PHP Stockholm syndrome with extra steps.

ofrzeta 3y ago
I guess it depends on how it's communicated. If someone tells me he doesn't like PHP because of this and that reason, that's fine. Getting wound up about some specific programming language (feature) or any tech still raises a red flag for me. But then I might be terrible as well :)
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  I can be pretty confident that if a language is not from the ML family I’m not going to like it for all of the reasons it’s not a ML language.
- cutler 3y ago
  Whatever happened to passionate programmers?
  - cardanome 3y ago
    One of the reasons why I love working on PHP jobs is that I get to avoid "passionate" programmers. It's fine to be excited about programming but those that build their whole identity around it are just super obnoxious and not fun to work with.
    - cutler 3y ago
      Thousands at Railsconf or Clojure Conj would disagree, I'm sure but these languages are kinda special.
  - ofrzeta 3y ago
    I am totally passionate about removing complexity from apps and stacks.

rvense 3y ago

There's plenty of stacks that I'd say qualify as "simple, cheap, straightforward, and fast" (modern Java, for instance - huge red flag to me if people still turn up their nose at Java), including some that you'd probably consider exotic (honourable mention: Elixir+Phoenix). I personally never liked PHP, so I haven't kept up with how it has developed and I don't expect to start, to be honest. Of course, if you've got an otherwise interesting project that happens to be PHP and want to pay me to help you with it, I'll be professional about it, but there are too many alternatives that appeal to me more than PHP for anything where I have a say.

gumballindie 3y ago

PHP has matured and has been a nice language for a decade now. But PHP developers havent. Cargo culting “good practice” and lack of creativity plagues the community. Frameworks have become so heavy that you spend more time configuring them than actually adding value. Oh and some still argue over setters and getters.

notresidenter 3y ago
That hasn't been my experience at all. Although, I do spend more time interacting with the Laravel community (a subset of the PHP community) than the PHP community itself. I found the (Laravel) community to be more about object-level discussions ("how to do x feature the best way possible") rather than meta-level discussions.
znpy 3y ago
But that’s kinda their point… you spend time configuring the framework instead of reimplementing from scratch and doing the plumbing yourself.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  The issue is that there is so much configuration that it’s basically coding. PHP frameworks are all bloat. It would have been much better to abstract things in a way that you actually spend time on features not thousands of configs.
  - liveoneggs 3y ago
    Then use lumen, it comes with laravel.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Nah, I’ll use python or other proper languages, thanks.
      - 3y ago

tialaramex 3y ago

PHP8. You think it's a red flag when people don't believe that PHP8 finally got their shit together. What's that George W Bush line, Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again. But we're not talking about getting fooled just once, or twice, we're talking about eight times.

ceejayoz 3y ago
First off, this comment reveals some ignorance about the language. PHP 6 never existed. Trying to infer anything off version numbers like this is goofy; in a much shorter time period Node is up to v20. Does 20 versus 8 mean anything? No. No one got “fooled”. The got a useful tool that got better over time.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  Anybody who believes that this time PHP isn't awful can expect the same disappointment as the last few times. I'm an old man, I remember all the pain of upgrading to PHP3 and for my sins my current work includes trying to cajole somebody's PHP7.x code into running even though it appears their employer disowned the project we know if we don't make it work the "replacement" will never actually materialise. This is a language built by people who didn't really know any better, so I don't blame them, but it's ludicrous to pretend that it's a "red flag" to have noticed that this keeps happening and learned from that experience.

dgb23 3y ago

> If someone's still hating on PHP in 2023 it makes me wonder if they've been focused on more exotic technology because they were looking to pad their resume with more expensive skills, build science projects for their own amusement vs. what the business needed, etc. etc. Red flag. I get that you are arguing from personal experiences, people you met and worked with. But this statement lacks context and nuance. There are developers who don't like PHP because of outdated reasons and possibly because they are snobs. Sure, that's a red flag. But there are many who have so many battle scars and war stories with the language and its ecosystem that they decided it's just not worth the pain anymore. Even though PHP has evolved (with regular breaking changes...) and tries its best to put something useful on top of a shaky foundation: The effort required to make PHP work with you, in comparison to other languages, becomes too large and painful. I'm not talking about superficial things here, nor do I have the tendency to overengineer stuff, quite the contrary. I'm talking about writing simple, robust and efficient code. However I would say there are three very good reasons why you should use or at least consider the language: - You want to quickly hack together something useful with minimal fuss, AKA its original purpose. - Buy-in of the OO, code generation, IoC/DI, magic framework stuff that Laravel/Symphony provide. - You have to.

jusssi 3y ago
> magic framework stuff that Laravel/Symphony provide The magic in these frameworks is evil, and likely a big part in ruining PHP's reputation. Laravel in particular hides way too much stuff behind magic, and when it goes wrong you find yourself sifting through OOP-obfuscated layers of framework and libraries just to find out how exactly your controller is called.
- dgb23 3y ago
  I agree with you. But, and this is a big but, it's a tradeoff. You also get benefits. This is why I said "buy-in". If you are comfortable with doing things in their way, you get a ton of leverage: easily consistent code, a fast and productive "get off the ground" experience. The downside is what you described. Personally I'm just not a fan anymore of these things. You quickly produce code that _looks_ clean and consistent. But it's also bloated and brittle, especially if you need to break out of the happy path. A framework like that is great if you don't do software design, but more of a hindrance if you do. There's no framework that can help you do a holistic solution. For that you need good tooling, a robust foundation (AKA not PHP and probably not JS) and a simple design. Again: Trade off. That's why many here in these discussions will tell you that X or Y is the best thing since sliced bread - because it fits their needs almost perfectly. But you also get many (like us) who have at least some reservations, because had to bend over backwards to fit a square peg into a round hole and ultimately wasted so much time that using X or Y wasn't worth it at all.

switch007 3y ago

These “as a super important hiring manager” brags are quite boring to read

fsociety 3y ago

Ditto for any language. I think it is a good sign for someone to recognize the trade-offs a language makes, or even accept that they can complain about it while acknowledging they don’t understand the trade-offs. But when a dev says X is objectively bad, that is not a good sign. Languages are tools, not a way of life.

za3faran 3y ago

What about people who get their stuff done with mature, well established, and high performant Java and C# frameworks? The benefits of static languages is already established, particularly for longer maintained and larger code bases where multiple people work on them.