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Comment by pdimitar | Hacker News Reader

> My criticism isn't the valid criticisms of PHP, it's that no matter how much progress the language makes people are quick to find reasons to be dismissive.

It's perfectly valid to be dismissive of PHP and you should recognize that. Main reason: there's a metric ton of PHP 5.X websites out there who are never going to be upgraded. That alone is a reason enough to distrust PHP.

If the community makes a concerted effort to introduce automated upgrades of legacy PHP codebases to the newer (supposedly better) versions then I personally would become a fan.

Everybody can tout the newest and greatest. Working with -- and improving -- the legacy stuff is what earns the respect of many, myself included.

(Disclaimer: not a JS dev. You seem to imply some kind of irony that JS devs mock PHP but this is not the case with me at least.)

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Your point of view is so backwards. You dismiss an entire tool because legacy work exists? So because Windows 3.1 doesn't upgrade to Windows 10 I shouldn't bother? Because IE11 doesn't run ES5 we shouldn't work with it?

You are free to criticize the enormous amount of legacy codebases out there, but that is not the fault of PHPs core team and the community working to improve the language and ecosystem, and it doesn't make PHP a bad tool. Environment maintenance isn't the languages responsibility and PHP has been -very- careful with it's upgrade path. It's childs play to move between versions.

If anything you should be impressed at legacy PHPs robustness. How long will modern stacks last unatended? Barely a year in my experience before some CI or dependancy breaks and the whole tower crumbles. Try and run an NPM based build pipeline in two years and tell me how that automated upgrade path worked out.

> You dismiss an entire tool because legacy work exists? So because Windows 3.1 doesn't upgrade to Windows 10 I shouldn't bother? Because IE11 doesn't run ES5 we shouldn't work with it?

The crucial difference here is that nobody ever will even attempt to upgrade the PHP 5.X websites to PHP 7 or 8, whereas a lot of people gradually upgraded from Win 3.1 to Win10 over the years.

Obviously I am not saying "don't bother". Judging by your strong words (which don't make your argument more compelling) you seem to be a fan so you do you, code all the PHP that you like. I am giving you a realistic take on why many skip PHP. You getting a bit emotional over this doesn't change my stance.

There is such a thing as writing code that is good, functional and satisfies the business requirements; this same code can also run untouched for years. Yes, this is a thing, and actually a hallmark of quality work.

Non-constructive snark with zero correlation to the topic at hand.

I have been visiting -- and repairing -- PHP 5.X websites for years. They are anything but stable. I did maintain Java mastodons for years and they have been both (a) stable and robust and (b) legacy. But PHP projects I was in long time ago -- far from it. Could be anecdotal evidence.

To not make this annoying for future readers: I am okay with legacy code sitting untouched (although I will argue it is usually more broken than you seem to imply), but I am not okay with advertising a language that definitely didn't help the reputation of the IT branch in the eyes of everybody else. PHP sits on a broken foundation.

I have a right to express my opinion and you have a right to express yours. Let's leave it at that since we aren't going to achieve anything here (except flags for non-constructive posts).

It's just a tired discussion sorry, hence the strong words, I respect your points of view so far and I appreciate the discussion (for what it's worth I've been upvoting your comments as I see they're getting grayed out).

There is a strong, intelligent community backing PHP and working with PHP, and you are dismissing it for things out of their control I feel. You're not taking a realistic perspective on what starting a project with PHP is really like today. It's fast, it has easy deployability, and you can use all the software engineering best practices you so please. Instead you're implying that the abandoned projects from yesteryear are what PHP is about today.

During it's prime, the web exploded with PHP installations built by people who had never touched software before and may never have touched it again, that's what legacy PHP is. It can't be fixed by the PHP community because those installations aren't run by people who are involved in the PHP community. PHP has a very sane upgrade path, but the people who run those installs will never know about it or be interested in it.

I agree that mine -- and many others' -- points of view on PHP are skewed by a sort of a "shameful past". And I agree it's uncharitable. I am facing the same myself in the Elixir community which, despite being a very well-made language with an excellent runtime is still being derided by its lack of strong typing.

So I know your sentiment and I sympathize with it.

I too was a bit too dismissive and I am sorry.

My point was more along the lines of the seeming fact that the PHP community shrunk and, as you said, the original people who made it popular are long gone, likely to never come back. Not sure if anything can be done about it. As a fan of a fringe language I know how it is.

For what it's worth, I only heard good things about Laravel and several other libraries (or frameworks? don't know) along the lines of big productivity boosts.

Here's to hoping that one day all of that will converge somewhere where all of us will have to deal with less BS.

This analogy doesn't work. You can still use a lot of these legacy mistakes today.

You can write bad code in any language, but we've tried to move on from that and employ solid software engineering within PHP.

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