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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Remember that the hyped-up companies you hear about on HN & other social media aren't the entire world. There are plenty of companies out there that stay quiet and outside of the spotlight and use the language just fine. The same applies for PHP and other languages that are considered (unfairly IMO) "old-school".

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PHP is rarely considered "old school." It's considered bad. And not without reason given its history of hostility to its own developers and the sysadmins who have to manage it.

I think pretty much everyone has acknowledged that it's improved. Where opinions differ is in how much it has improved and whether that's enough to entertain its use (my answers to which are "not enough" and "not even if you paid me", respectively).

I agree that PHP is bad in certain ways, even though I started with PHP before transitioning to other languages.

But honestly, every language has to make some trade-offs. Even if PHP has some things that are bad design choices as opposed to trade-offs, it can still be worthwhile to put up with them if you have an existing codebase written in it or want to take advantage of libraries that don't exist in other languages.

As a result I don't consider any language as bad or old school. They might have downsides but 1) the upsides might outweigh them in certain use-cases and 2) any competent developer should be able to make something good with any Turing-complete language so I don't judge by the language alone, and especially not by the "hype factor" of the language.

What is it like to use pho compared to nodejs or python? Some of us haven’t had the pleasure

It's... ugly? I started with PHP, like many. And the documentation was excellent, as were deployment options. But even though familiarity tends to breed sympathy, it took me only five minutes of seeing Ruby to question why I ever put up with PHP. Just the need to prefix $variables alone is off-putting, and so were the inconsistancies in style. There were camelCase() functions, but also under_score(). Sometimes it was search_all(), then find_all(), next all_matching(). Some counting method might actually return 0, others nil (for zero matches). And I seem to remember one even returned the string "0".

(not actual examples–I have luckily forgotten)

For me (php5, older now I know) it was things like create_function() taking a string. It was (is? dunno) an ugly and crude language, no subtleties in the syntax, just warts. I'm firmly of the belief you can make good things with any language but I don't feel any desire to make things with PHP when there's other good options.

Imagine JavaScript, but more like Java, but not very strictly typed, half the methods in the standard library follow different patterns for method signatures, and no event loop or JIT.

That being said, I have yet to see a NodeJS framework beat developer productivity in Symphony or Larvel for CRUD stuff. Django maybe.

Raw PHP without a framework is awful. With a framework it’s decent.

"PHP is rarely considered "old school." It's considered bad"

PHP hasn't been considered 'bad' for a few years now. It has been battle tested on many large-scale websites.

Now, One of the main issues is that anyone can write a few lines of code and call themselves a developer, so you have horrible code bases still out there...but this has more to do with the developer than the language.

"my answers to which are "not enough" and "not even if you paid me", respectively

I love hearing answers like this. This is why I'm still paid so well to write PHP code after 15 years in the industry.

I avoided php and its ecosystem like a plague for the longest time. However the who eco-system has evolved including the language e.g. functional paradigm (closures) and syntactic improvement (arrow functions). When you combine this with a modern web framework like php Laravel it is an absolute pleasure to work with, specifically as a monolithic for rapid application development, which is great for MVPs and ensuring you have product market fit. I am not sure how this translates over time to a micros-services. However if you're starting to writing a new application I would definitely recommend php + laravel for rapid application development. I say this relative to my extensive experience with nodejs express/java spring boot.

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