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Comment by donutdan4114 | Hacker News Reader

I've been really liking PHP lately. PHP 7 has awesome new features and performance improvements. Of course, PHP isn't right for every application, but I feel like PHP needs to be taken more seriously, compared to Ruby and Python, for large-scale applications, and fast-response web services.

It's hard to break an old stigma.. but.. PHP7 is NOTHING like PHP4, and a LOT better than PHP5.x.

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There's still so much nonsense that you don't have to worry about in other languages. PHP still has, for example, php.ini, errors (not to be confused with exceptions), a messy standard library with no coherent naming system or organisation, obvious feature gaps, inconsistent and unintuitive behaviour in many places, outright bugs that have been documented but never fixed, etc.

Nonetheless, things are improving bit by bit. PHP has come a long way.

This may very well be true (I haven't written PHP since the era of 4/5-beta), but it's probably going to be a lot like Java in the sense that the older devs scarred from Java 1.0 - 1.5 basically want nothing to do with it anymore and rant and rave about the language despite the language and ecosystem evolving considerably.

Agree. PHP 7 is indeed a pretty decent language. At the same time, it's worth checking out the Hacklang[1], which looks even more interesting than PHP 7. I wonder how many people tried Hack on production.

[1] http://hacklang.org/

We have some scripts in PHP and yes, PHP 7 is a big step forward. In some ways it's more advanced than C# in terms of language features. It's still ugly but you can do very interesting things with it.

>In some ways it's more advanced than C# in terms of language features.

Like..?

Traits, closures don't capture everything by reference

Traits are available since PHP 5.4.

Totally agree. PHP7's speed is awesome. And the service that the author points out (Laravel Forge) provisions VPSes with PHP7.

The author is totally right about Forge, I have never EVER had a better provisioning experience.

Not only the language itself, but the frameworks have evolved and nowadays stuff like Laravel is miles ahead of ZF.

We have DB migrations, model/controller/views scaffolding, simple and powerful routing, etc.

>PHP 7 has awesome new features and performance improvements

"Awesome new features" does not make up for the rotten core that remains. It never will. So please, don't be fooled by the additions to the language (Which by the way has a history of being poorly built and does not fit well with the rest of the language).

So Php 7 is still Php and all it implies. A language that no one should be unfortunate enough to use in 2016. Case in point [1].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/lolphp/comments/41fqib/it_is_so_sim...

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