Interesting. It doesn't amaze me the continued popularity of PHP. The language, framework, and ecosystem just work. Plenty of people well versed in it. It's not sexy, and I've done more than a few years of consultancy there.
PHP has its special place for every developer that works on web. And it got all recent improvements thanks to all those criticisms. I think every popular language receives criticism and that's just fine.
I'm happy that the language is evolving and there is a strong ecosystem with quality libraries and developers unlike what it used to be 5 years ago.
I've been doing several languages (Scala, and Typescript. also Go recently) in last few years. But, I still follow PHP ecosystem closely and I'd definitely choose it for my next web startup. It's just 10x faster and ultimately cheaper to build web with PHP. That's why there are so many big success stories that started with PHP even in areas that you wouldn't believe. Surprisingly enough, not only web! One of Cloudflare's founders said on an interview that their back-end was written in PHP and it was used for a long time. That's one of the things that you think no one would do.
Like PHP in general, it was easy to get started with and now there are tons of developers pushing it in the ecosystem. Now that so many people know it, it's self-perpetuating at this point.
In fairness, PHP was in a different place 12 years ago. The language has improved in that time. There are still lots of warts but the language and ecosystem have worked together to push it forward.
I'm going to be honest, I only use it because of company lock in. I hated it for many years but some of the stuff released and some of the stuff on the way in the internals is quite exciting.
I think it’s still used a lot. The startup I worked with that used php (5 years ago) just got bought.
I think it’s pretty stable and so doesn’t get a lot of mindshare. It not what the cool startups are using but it’s still used. With a framework like Laravel or symfony I enjoy working with it.
PHP is growing these days. Some of the hip crowd are coming back, small business never left and globally it is gaining as more developers come online. PHP offers so much so easily it's hard to replace.
PHP still has a vibrant ecosystem.
1) cost
2) simplicity
3) scalability
With the advent of Chinese frameworks that solve C1000K problems like swoole, workerman and so on it even found its place as high performance interactive backend server.
Firstly, PHP has always been around, WordPress based websites still have like 1/3 share of all existing websites.
Secondly, in the recent years it got a very mature language, got loads of improvements and performance optimizations. With PHP 8 being planned to be released by the end of this year, it will be another major step forward.
Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome.
I think if PHP does a major comeback as a decent platform for development and somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation, those PHP devs who stayed with PHP and didn't switch to RoR, Django, Node or other platforms will be winners, including me :)
Good for PHP that it's getting more and more traction (attention) lately. Bad press is still press & PHP is quite not bad nowadays, when you start from scratch.
New energy in an ecosystem is never a bad thing.
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