Especially in Europe it is still the dominant backend language. If you want to have flexibility on where you work it is a good language to know.
You have the productivity of a scripting language but still great static analysis tools that help you out. It really fills a sweet spot that no other language does.
Yes, Node has Typescript but then you have a super slow compiler negating the scripting language benefits. With PHP I can change a file and see instant results. Also languages like Go make it hard to debug anything on an live server as it is all compiled.
PHP code is mostly boring. The coding style tends to be very pragmatic. Even bad beginner code runs great due to dead code elimination and the like. Shared nothing architecture makes understanding and debugging the system so much easier.
Hosting is simple and inexpensive. Beginner can just copy their files to an shared hoster and be done with it.
PHP is only a bad choice is you have really complex requirement and need a high level of reliability, which most Web projects don't. I think Haskell fills a good niche here. It is really underestimated. Also Elixir if you happen to build anything where you can play out its strength.
The elitists who constantly hound on PHP's deficiencies as if developers haven't heard about them for the last 20 years are the same types of people who build a fancy side project that never sees the light of day because it's massively over-engineered in some obscure flavor-of-the-month language.
Your customers don't care what's under the hood beyond your ability to provide value to them. If PHP lets you ship faster and get your product in the hands of consumers, it's a good language.
That a lot of the issues that were "not a problem" in the 5.x days are now addressed in PHP 7 and 8 is evidence that the technical criticism was valid and hardly "elitist".
There are many successful projects in many different languages. You're using one of them right now. That claim only PHP devs care about shipping useful products is extremely silly.
> PHP is only a bad choice is you have really complex requirement and need a high level of reliability, which most Web projects don't. I think Haskell fills a good niche here. It is really underestimated.
Actually I find PHP projects to be more reliable to host than stuff written in Java, the lingua franca of business projects. Constant worrying about heap sizes, garbage collection, resource leaks or your entire server crashing because of some exception somewhere... you don't have anything like that in PHP (with the exception of memory_limit, which is fairly rare to hit in a decent hoster), simply because of the shared-nothing architecture of PHP.
Especially in Europe it is still the dominant backend language. If you want to have flexibility on where you work it is a good language to know.
You have the productivity of a scripting language but still great static analysis tools that help you out. It really fills a sweet spot that no other language does.
Yes, Node has Typescript but then you have a super slow compiler negating the scripting language benefits. With PHP I can change a file and see instant results. Also languages like Go make it hard to debug anything on an live server as it is all compiled.
PHP code is mostly boring. The coding style tends to be very pragmatic. Even bad beginner code runs great due to dead code elimination and the like. Shared nothing architecture makes understanding and debugging the system so much easier.
Hosting is simple and inexpensive. Beginner can just copy their files to an shared hoster and be done with it.
PHP is only a bad choice is you have really complex requirement and need a high level of reliability, which most Web projects don't. I think Haskell fills a good niche here. It is really underestimated. Also Elixir if you happen to build anything where you can play out its strength.