PHP is 25 years old this year. Despite all the hate it gets, the core team continues to move the language forward, and it most definitely has its niche in web development.
Regardless of all the koolaid peddled these days by all the dev blogs, the fact is that at the end of the day to make a website you can still use the same backend that you used in 2005 (aka lamp) and it still works flawlessly for most of the sites (or any site getting less than 1M hits a month which is quite common).
If you want to get shit done quickly PHP is still as relevant as ever imo.
It's still in major use across the industry so I don't think it's too little too late. Maybe late, but not too late. I think it's pragmatism is partly why it's still so popular. No need to rush to the next best thing as PHP is perfectly capable of taking you from side-project to enterprise software with millions of users.
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.
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.
PHP has evolved leaps and bounds as a language, and as a community and ecosystem. It's still ubiquitous too. There seems to be an entirely theoretical delineation between "serious work" and PHP applications, but it doesn't exist in reality.
I still find it has one of the best developer experiences for web applications, out of all the tools I've had to learn through agency work.
There are a ton of features in modern PHP which address a lot of the common criticisms brought against it. Doing a proper comparison with other languages (framework to framework, not framework to language) I think PHP measures up reasonably well.
But there is so much terrible, legacy code out there. The evolution, if it's happening is happening very slowly.
Php is still a super effective lever for people starting out. It has some really bad technical warts but it has the shortest path to "shit's on screen" amongst web-based scripting languages.
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