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Comment by jackofalltrades | Hacker News Reader

I can't really understand the hate towards php in general, never was able to understand it. I started programming in PHP and then moved to c# and now mostly JS, but never really understood the motivations behind people bashing on PHP. Like, some of my friends that today mostly program in React/Nextjs praise the framework as something amazing and the SSR as something really innovative, and - honestly - it resembles PHP more than ever, but if you ask them about PHP they will immediately say it is a "bad language" and "a joke". Laravel, as you stated, is a really amazing framework, but some people are carrying baggage from the time of PHP4 or something even older and never really tried to see current/modern PHP and some other people just built their idea of the language around it because it was the cool thing to do.

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Because it's fairly popular (#6ish or something) as a language, it is more probable that people are forced to use it at the threat of unemployment.

Nobody is forced to write Haskell or Rust, you have to actively look for such positions.

Then again, this doesn't explain why the number #1 language (Python) is so liked...

as a Ruby/Rails guy, I feel the same way. Seems like Rails became the top stack to shit on to feel better about your stack these days. People are just tribal. We need to feel superior to the "other" to feel better about ourselves.

Funny, I remember everyone hating on PHP when they moved to RoR, and now they hate that are and moving on. Its almost as if they just need things to hate so they can rewrite code. its very cyclical IMO.

The elitism of learning a new language and then mocking those that haven't put in the same time and effort to row in the exact same direction, has always amused me. Ive never judged anyone for what tools they use to get their job done, but apparently i am a rare breed in that i am more concerned with the output then the language choice.

RoR was guilty of that as well, so we kinda deserve it. The community was more of an antithesis to java actually, not php.

This and the parent comments are assuming that all language criticism boils down to tribalism/elitism and not problems with the language itself, as if all PLs are the same, and the choice to use them is arbitrary.

I mean the choice isn't literally arbitrary but it matters a lot less than the ecosystem and you can't really make a wrong choice as .NET, JS, PHP, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, $ReasonablyPopularLang are all plenty productive.

Sure, but there are legitimate criticisms around types, complexity, security, maintainability, scalability and performance where the language choice can matter. Certainly when the project gets large.

those concerns prevail in every large project i've seen, regardless of language.

I think skill and knowledge of the coders is vastly more important then the language choice... you can write insecure, slow code in any language.

somewhat agree, but many comments here detracting from PHP don't have any substance as to why... they come off as tribal and elitest.

Kinda like how people used to hate typed compiled languages and migrated to scripted dynamic languages en masse. Then they discovered they want performance of compiled language so they built JIT into their interpreters, eventually adding compilers as well into their languages. Then they also realized that enforcing types are actually good, so they built typing support into their languages, finally coming full circle after 20 years.

I see it both ways. While java can never let go of types, the language is doing what it can to reduce the verbosity that is inherent with types (by e.g introducing inferred types, lambdas etc). I can't say that dynamic languages stopped being dynamic. Yes, there's typescript. But there's a shit ton of dynamic code out there, being written at this very moment probably.

I've been (re-)learning Rails now that it's at version 6 instead of... 2.x, I think, when I last tried it? I've been joking that now that Rails is no longer cool, it means the people left are probably settling down to do serious work.

While I think you're right about the elitism hype cycle, I do think Rails and PHP have something in common, though -- they were systems that people who really weren't that interested in learning how to program leapt into in droves, because they were both perceived as "anyone can learn to code" technologies. And that led to an awful lot of bad code written with PHP and with Rails, which in turn contributed to the buzz about both turning sour.

They both try to lower the bar for a person to become a productive web developer. Dhh (Rails creator) calls it "conceptual compression". But in reality, to build anything half mature you not only have to know how to program, you also have to understand the concepts Rails supposedly compresses. The complexity is still there. The best example I have for this fallacy is the notion that ActiveRecord can make SQL obsolete thus make the framework easier for beginners. Dhh advocates this and it's absolute horse shit. But yes, both Rails and php are beginner friendly, that has pros and cons and comes with a reputation.

no PHP framework is similar to the thing that NextJS/Reactis doing. The output is the same (well, isn’t the point of web framework is to spit out HTML?) but the methodology is totally different.

And about 100x more complex and fragile.

Not at all. I have worked with both for a long time and I can clearly see the differences. They are used for different purposes. The people comparing any PHP frameworks to NextJS have not been very experienced with frontend development, IMO.

Not necessarily. I recently rewrote an old web application written in php and jquery with django, react and typescript. The new application has roughly the same LoC count while having more features and better interactivity.

Comparing strictly SSR yes. Though if one needs a lot of dynamic client side behavior a JS framework can be easier to reason about.

Lately modern PHP frameworks have so a lot of dependencies too. So both stacks are getting fatter as their capabilities grow.

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