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Some of commenters are "ex" php develops. For me PHP was painfull but I didn't know that until I moved on to Ruby and now Go. I would never go back to PHP programming(i tried few years ago) just like I would not go back to Windows(except for budget or political reasons). PHP was fun back in the day because you could host it anywhere and truth be told it was an easy scripting language to learn but I don't see many reasons to use it today. Not that you can't build great products or scale it but I can no longer enjoy programming in PHP.

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I rarely see comments like yours. You clearly mention that you used PHP a few years ago, so anyone reading your criticism will have that context and will want to try the newer version. Again, those who criticize should mention when they last used a language/framework and exactly what they didn't like about it. I've seen tomes written making fun of Javascript's type coercion when any "professional" JavaScript developer knows that the answer almost always is "strict equality".

I have similar experience. Left when it was still 5.* something.

Now I mainly do TypeScript/JavaScript and some Rust on the side.

To me, PHP was more of a limiter rather than painful experience (it was a bit painful though). I couldn't imagine how to even make a chat app.

If not for my moving out of PHP to NodeJS now I wouldn't be a software architect and explore the rest of the fun and challenging part of computing domain.

I started out with PHP at a very very young age and eventually moved on to other platforms (mainly Python). Not looking to question your experience - but actually recalling my own. Making a chat app was one of the first things I did. It was a super basic CRUD app mixing HTML and some code, refreshing the page every few secs, thanks to some meta tags.

Of course, it used frames, so that the "send message" part didn't clear every time it refreshed… those were the days! Eventually, my fancy chat app delivered a much better user experience, thanks to an amazing (back then!) JS library — jQuery. I built my first "API" that way! (It didn't use XML or JSON - it just returned chunks of HTML that were appended to a div).

Pure PHP gets annoying when you're dealing with complex data models, or when you're building a combination of frontend plus backend batch processing. Frameworks such as Laravel make this much much nicer to deal with IMHO. Of course, PHP is far from perfect, and its quirks can cause OCD and frustration to some people… :-)

But thanks to PHP (and also thanks to how lenient and chaotic it was), I was able to create very early on without needing to worry about software patterns (I had no clue what MVC was back then!), strict code formatting, learning how to deploy an app (just upload the code and off you go), and so on. PHP got me into programming — and it's also propelled some big-name sites and apps, so I guess it deserves some credit there as well.

Http polling came across my mind, but I always thought "No I won't do that". But in my noob mind it was full of http overhead and it must be ws like interaction. Apparently it was a thing, Facebook and a lot others use it.

And laravel, it was everything I knew. I really liked it, the orm was superb, the template engine was superb. It has it downside though, the big amount of code need to be parsed.

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