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.
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.
The ecosystem a piece of software is attached to is tremendously important. PHP did a great job with fitting into the existing one. It's not that PHP is better. It did a better job in the most critical ways. (It was also decently fast.)
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.
People like to hate on PHP (and to be honest I really never enjoyed it), but there was a time when if you wanted to build powerful, large scale websites (or hosting, or scalable web farm deployments) it was the most reliable and performant thing short of Java.
It also helped that the PHP ecosystem had some pretty solid and battle tested HTTP components and pretty productive frameworks--server-side rendering with Varnish was as fast as a CDN-backed site feels today.
PHP, surprisingly, has legs. I started using it at my job in circa 2000, then moved to Rails, then to Node, then back to PHP for another project. It had lots of problems in 2000. But it has been fixed over the years.
It's not the dinosaur people make it out to be. The main concern was the number of threads it creates, and how that limits its scalability. But modern *Nix cores can handle more than 1024 processes. Node definitely improves efficiency by using async architecture which reduces OS load, but PHP isn't the devil as some claim.
I think there's a treadmill habit of JS frameworks that make anything >2 years old seem out-of-date, but PHP has it's benefits... assuming one adheres to separation of concerns (something that was casually disregarded by the same pedants when they discovered React, Angular, and Vue).
Recently i feel there even is a kind of PHP renaissance. I think its a good time to revisit PHP and look at what it has to offer these days.
The community is enormous and open source frameworks like symfony2, zend2 or laravel are thriving like never before with solid implementations for nearly everything. With composer there is mature packet management now and in general the code put out for these kind of projects is of very high quality. And then there is facebook pushing PHP forward with things like HHVM, however for most stuff i have worked on, php execution time hasn't really been the bottleneck anyway, but its nice being able to squeeze out even more speed.
These days i also work a lot in node and angular, but PHP (using symfony) is still my goto language for a solid REST backend and/or classic static content based websites.
Very important parts of the web continue to use PHP. Forget WordPress, we're talking fast, scaleable, well engineered applications built by software engineers, being used by millions of people a day. Built using the same software engineering principles you would use in any other language. It's just a language after all, and both the language and it's community have matured a great deal.
It's interesting that people are re-inventing parts of PHP in different ecosystems around this time. There is also the astro framework for example.
PHP has some properties that make it very suited for certain kinds of web development:
- stateless, very easy to reason about from a request/response cycle standpoint
- "serverless" and operationally cheap
- seamless HTML templating
- streams HTML by default
- batteries included
- straight forward and flexible first class data structures (associative arrays) with data literal syntax and value semantics.
- file based routing
Unfortunately, the PHP ecosystem has moved more and more away from that initial value proposition. Instead of cleaning and oiling this wonderfully productive and simple machinery, it wanted to grow into something else.
One can only imagine if PHP instead retained a focus on what made it unique and useful while making it more robust, secure by default and performant.
I wish it had focused on:
- making arrays even more ergonomic and leverage them more in general
- introduced a secure by default (escaping etc.) HTML template syntax
- introduced something like a load.php that can be used to keep some basic, global stuff in memory between requests
- improved on the idea of file based routing
- drastically improved error handling and introspection
As it stands now, it is on other ecosystems or even new languages to pick up the slack and try to capture what made PHP great.
If the JIT for PHP ever becomes good enough it solves the memory leak problems PHP to this day is still plagued with, that might be enough to convince me to use PHP again, possibly, for some workloads.
I can't help but feel that PHPs popularity is mostly tied to Wordpress, and to a lesser extend Laravel (with Symfony coming in behind that).
Not really sure the rest of the ecosystem even matters, outside those core pieces. I'd love to see it fix alot of landstanding issues, and I love that the language has moved forward. I've worked with it professionally over the last few years in various places, and I don't particularly dislike so called "modern" PHP, but its only really good at very specified problem domains (mostly, you have a website, need to display said website. I always had scaling problems for anything other than using it in the context of a template language or very straightfoward database access. Real time APIs? nope. Just couldn't get it done, too much memory pressure)
For me, PHP is still ideal developer experience, even after a decade of working with it.
The language has evolved tastefully without breaking away from the past in drastic(pythonic) ways. Frameworks like Laravel still continue to evolve in a rapid pace than its contemporaries in other languages, bringing in support for every new advancement like webpack, OAuth, etc.
Text editor support is also rapidly accelerating with LSP as a part of the core runtime. PHPStorm is still a beast of an IDE. Composer is in many ways an ideal package manager, a cross between the ease of bundler and local package scoping of npm.
The runtime evolves at a rapid pace, with performance improvements in every release and the upcoming JIT.
Most importantly, the development and deployment story of PHP is still easy as ever. Unlike other modern stacks that require arcane version manager, virtual environments, docker layers, etc, the LAMP stack is still the one script environment creator that requires nothing more than a working Linux distro. The WAMP one click installer still works on Windows without any Subsystems.
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.
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