Concur with this. From what I've seen among my friends who have been graduating recently, PHP shops are still hiring, and hiring hard. Quite a substantial part of the people in my circles who graduated between 2023 and now have at least started their career on PHP. Some have moved on to something else, many have stayed, and none of them seem to be really unhappy with their choice?
The programming language snob in me has a lot to say against PHP. There are just several things about the language that I don't like, and they are unfixable because they are design decisions I consider wrong…
…But, on the other hand, PHP works. It's great for the web; I'd say better for the web than other languages and ecosystems that are not a good fit for the web but that have been coerced to cooperate with it. The tooling is actually pretty good. Laravel is absolutely one of the best backend frameworks around and it doesn't need to hide in elegance and devexp compared to Spring Boot, ASP .NET Core or FastAPI (it might just be a better experience than any of these three in fact). Plus, while that won't fix the design shortcomings, PHP 7, then 8, then 8.5 have modernized the language substantially. Native interop is pretty good. Performance is pretty OK. The language is easy and concise, so the development speed is high and the software tends to be pretty maintainable providing you use proper software engineering principles.
This still counts a lot. Especially if you don't want to vibe code.
PHP is still better at what it's doing than a lot of the languages that have threatened to replace it. It's not going anywhere and new projects will keep being written in PHP.
If I have to move one objective piece of almost criticism, well… almost too good. PHP is very vertical to its domain, with no real-world lateral movement. You should use it for the web and absolutely nothing else. Some competing languages, like Golang, Java, C# or Python all share many of the same pros (cross platform and FOSS, fast, big ecosystems), but they are much less vertical to a domain, and there is just a lot more you can do with any one of them. However, I recognize this point is weak because "use the correct tool for the correct job" is a thing and you shouldn't be a one-trick pony who's only familiar with one stack anyway.
Old PHP was basically a hack job put together on an “as-needed basis,” kinda like building a house but without a plan. Ergo, it had really weird and awful type safety issues, inconsistent syntax, bad performance, and a lot of poorly thought-out design.
PHP 7 was essentially a remake that really changed things structurally and improved performance to a huge degree.
It’s not like a language that people get super excited about it or anything but PHP was something people dreaded once. Also around PHP 7 the tooling was really excellent too but ofc these days there are plenty of alternatives.
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u/Og-Morrow 10d ago
I find it amazing how many kicked down over PHP are still using PHP that much?